George Jackson Blood In My Eye

Blood in
My Eye

George L. Jackson

My dear only surviving son,

1 went to Mount Vernon August 7lh, 1971, to visit the grave site
of my heart your keepers murdered in cold disregard for life.

His grave was supposed to be behind your grandfather's and
grandmother's. But I couldn’t find it. There was no marker. Just
mowed grass. The story of our past. I sent the keeper a blank check
for a headstone — and two extra sites— blood in my eyc!H

Amerikan

Justice

For their freedom to prey on the world’s people . . .
whatever the cost in blood.

Dear Greg,

In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action
that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and
control public property must be prohibited and curtailed
whatever the cost in resources (the international wing of the
repressive institutions has spent one and one-half trillion
dollars since World War II), whatever the cost in blood (My
Lai, Augusta, Georgia, Kent State, the Panther trials, the
frame-up of Angela Davis)! The national repressive institu-
tions (police, National Guard, army, etc.) are no less deter-
mined. The mayors that curse the rioters and' the looters
(Mayor Daley of Chicago has ordered them summarily ex-
ecuted in the streets) ignore the fact that their bosses have
looted the world!!!

I refuse to make any argument with statistics compiled
by the institutions and associations that I indict. Yet it is true
that even official figures prove the case against capitalism.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation compiles and indexes
almost all information on crime in the United States — I have
the figures as it states them right here: Vital Statistics — FBI
Crime Report — property crimes, 87 percent of the total in
1969, 28 percent of these crimes occurring in the ghetto.
Since 1960, the number of men and women prisoners in state
and federal penitentiaries has fluctuated slightly around the
quarter-million mark. These statistics conceal the living real-
ity.

This is my eleventh year of being shoveled into every
major prison in the most populous state in the nation — and
the largest prison system in the world. What I have seen in

these eleven years is the living situation. The experience is
quite different from the columns of figures neatly arranged
to give the impression of well-studied, detached, scientific
and calculated analysis. Hidden are the facts that, at each
institution I’ve been in, 30 to sometimes 40 percent of those
held are black, and every one of the many thousands I’ve
encountered was from the working or lumpenproletariat
class. There may be a few exceptions, but I simply have not
met any of them in my eleven years. Where I am confined
now in San Quentin Prison, California, awaiting trial for two
alleged crimes* conviction on either of which would subject
my lungs to the poison-gas treatment, there are seventeen
cells in what is euphemistically called “the adjustment cen-
ter” but is far more accurately known as the hole. The A./C.
is San Quentin’s triple maximum security, and all of these
cells are filled — eleven of them with black men — every one
of them without exception from the working class.

I’ve been arrested, interrogated or investigated more
times than I care to count. I’ve learned ten times more about
the process than the most expert single groups of inquisitors.
From the first moment I’m brought into this scenario, I
attempt to establish control over the exchanges that will take
place between myself and my captors. Depending on the
situation, one learns to feign either indignation, surprise,
idiocy or fear. At times the peasant-philosopher face will
work. I don’t think I am an exception at all, as most blacks
learn by age fifteen how to handle the cretins who hire out
as guns for the privileged. There is only one type of inquisi-
tional situation that I personally cannot control — the ses-
sions that begin with violence. In those cases, guile fails and
blacks learn to fight multiple opponents while handcuffed, or
at least learn how to protect the groin area. I simply have
never managed to develop a technique against nine armed
men who are fascinated with damaging my private partsll
But, I’m still learningt

*The author was under indictment for two counts: first-degree mur-
der, and assault on a non-inmale causing death which, under Section 4S00
of the California Penal Code, automatically involves a sentence of death
upon conviction. — Ed.

“All black people, wherever they are, whatever their
crimes, even crimes against other Blacks, are political prison-
ers because the system has dealt with them differently than
with whites. Whitey gets the benefit of every law, every
loophole, and the benefit of being judged by his peers — other
white people. Blacks don’t get the benefit of any such jury
trial by peers. Such a trial is almost a cinch to result in the
conviction of a black person, and it's a conscious political
decision that blacks don’t have those benefits” (Howard
Moore Jr., attorney, official “of" the court, but not “for” the
court — he’s in a position to know — he’s honest, black, and
dedicated enough to tell).

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within
the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and
prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at
very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensi-
tized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order —
it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons,
and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social
order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied
firmly into economics. One can even pick that out of those
Vital Statistics. Bourgeois law protects property relations
and not social relationships. The cultural traits of capitalist
society that also tend to check activity — (individualism, ar-
tificial politeness juxtaposed to an aloof rudeness, the rush to
learn "how to" instead of “what is") — are secondary really,
and intended for those mild cases (and groups) that require
preventive measures only. The law and everything that inter-
locks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like
me.

Jonathan, my younger brother, understood this point
perfectly. The purport of the raid on the Marin County
Courthouse was more significant by far than its calculable
effects. I knew him well, since he was and still is my alter ego.
He went to liberate and to educate with aggressive and free
action. He knew that as he proceeded in liberating there
would be more action. He wasn't a speechmaker, and neither
am I. Escape from the myth, the hoax, by moving people into
action against the terror of the state — counter-terrorism — is

the real significance of the August 7th affair. To Jonathan, ST
the striking exposure was “audacity, audacity, and more
audacity." Theory and practice, strategy and tactics were
based in his mind on actual confrontation within “this" par-
ticular historical development. He must have calculated that
foco army activity that was hidden and nameless, operating
where the objective conditions for revolution already existed
and had existed for a dozen decades, would survive and grow
if, at the same time, the Black Panther political apparatus
continued to develop its autonomous infrastructure. Proof of
his theory was built right into the action: five desperate men
were offered arms as a means to freedom — three took them.

Proof of the role of law within the totalitarian-
authoritarian relationship was also built into the action. In
a fit of reckless, mindless gunfire, one hundred automated
goons shot through the bodies of a judge, district attorney,
and three female noncombatants to reestablish control over
all activity. To prevent certain actions, no cost in blood is too
high.

It would seem that so much free fire would be difficult
to explain, but it is not. Freedoms are invariably being pro-
tected with this gunfire. Freedom must then be interpreted
a thousand separate ways, but it actually comes down to
freedom for a few families and their friends — freedom to
prey upon the world.

Acceptance of enslavement is deeply buried in the pa-
thogenic character types of capitalism. It is a result of the
sense of dread and anxiety which is the lot of all men under
capitalist rule. Compulsive behavior and disordered obses-
sional longings are actually made synonymous with “charac-
ter” in our disordered society. But to emphasize these
conditions before examining the institutions from which they
spring is to confuse effect with cause and further cloud the
point of attack. So far, cultural analysis has established that
the psychosis is so ingrained, the institutions so centralized,
that what is needed is total revolution, the armed struggle
between the have-nots with their vanguard and the haves
with their hirelings or macabre freaks that live through them,

civil war between at least these two sections of the population
is the only purgative. Total revolution must be aimed at the
purposeful and__absolute destruction of the state and all .
present institutions, the destruction carried out by the so-
called psychopath, the outsider, whose only remedy is de-
struction of the system. This organized massive violence
directed at the source of thought control is the only realistic
therapy.

Analysis of the oppressed mentality and the psy-
chopathic personality that accrue from contact with the
prevarications of Amerikan culture must be carefully inte-
grated with the analysis of the source. Simple interpretation
of effects tends to calcify — it certainly promotes defeatism.
“Action makes the front." One can quietly refuse to accept
the constrictions of bourgeois culture, can reject himself,
hate the self and turn inward. By so doing he accomplishes
a form of individual revolt, but here again we find another
unconscious manifestation of the thing we hate — individual-
ism — a now attitudinal instrumentality of bourgeois culture.
We cannot escape— one simply cannot reject constrictions
without rejecting and putting to death the constrictor. An
armed attacker cannot be ignored. Gandhi and the gurus
were all abject fools. I would certainly be dead if, when
critical flash points matured, I hadn’t backed my rejection
with blows. I would hate to have been a Vietnamese in My
Lai without arms. I hate encounters like the one at my last
court appearance on April 6, 1971,* when the enemies who
attacked me had all the weapons. I would hate to run into
freaks who have Mike Hammer/J. Edgar Hoover complexes
without being armed. My pledge is to arms, my enemies are
institutions and any men with vested interests in them, even
if that interest is only a wage. If revolution means civil war
— I accept, and the sooner begun the sooner done.

I don’t think the enemy can be identified any more
carefully than this. Further identification must be made in

*On April 6, 1971, al a preliminary hearing of the Soledad Brothers’
murder trial, a bailiff persisted in jabbing George Jackson in the ribs
despite repeated warnings. Finally Jackson wheeled around and decked
the bailiff with a karate blow to the head. — Ed.

the process. I Teel dated that my brother died with two guns -y
in hand. I'm going to miss him and all the others, though
death in our situation is only a release. I miss people in-
tensely. I miss him intensely, but he and the others who
sought freedom died at the throat of the principal repressive
institution of the empire — they died making real attempts nt
freedom.

I paraphrase Castro on trial after Moncada:

"I warn you, gentlemen, I have only begunl”

Toward

the

United

Front

A new Unitarian and progressive current has sprung up in the
movement centering on political prisoners. How can this
Unitarian conduct be developed further in the face of deter-
mined resistance from the establishment? How can it be used
to isolate reactionary elements?

Unitary conduct implies a " search ” for those elements
in our present situation which can become the basis for joint
action. It involves a conscious reaching for the relevant, the
entente, and especially, in our case, thie reconcilable.
Throughout the centralizing authoritarian process of Ameri-
kan history, the ruling classes have found it necessary to
discourage and punish any genuine opposition to hierarchy.
But there have always been individuals and groups who
rejected the ideal of two unequal societies, existing one on top
of the other.

The men who placed themselves above the rest of so-
ciety through guile, fortuitous outcome of circumstance and
sheer brutality have developed two principal institutions to
deal with any and all serious disobedience — the prison and
institutionalized racism. There arc more prisons of all cate-
gories in the United Stales than in all other countries of the

world combined. At all times there are two-thirds of a mil-
lion people or more confined to these prisons. Hundreds are
destined to be legally executed, thousands more quasi-
legally. Other thousands will never again have any freedom
of movement barring a revolutionary change in all the insti-
tutions that combine to make up the order of things. One
third of a million people may not seem like a great number
compared with the total population of two hundred million.
However, compared with the one million who are responsi-
ble for all the affairs of men within the extended state, it
constitutes a striking contrast. What I want to explore now
are a few of the subtle elements that I . have observed to be
standing in the path of a much needed united front (nonsec-
tarian) to effectively reverse this legitimatized rip-off.

Prisons were not institutionalized on such a massive
scale by the people. Most people realize that crime is simply
the result of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth
and privilege, a reflection of the present state of property
relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so few
in the general prison population that we can discount them
altogether. Imp riso nment is an aspect ofclass struggle from
the outset. It is the creation of a closed society which at-
tempts to isolate those individuals who disregard the struc-
tures of a hypocritical establishment as well as those who
attempt to challenge it on a mass basis. Throughout its his-
tory, the United States has used its prisons to suppress any
organized efforts to challenge its legitimacy — from its at-
tempts to break up the early Working Men’s Benevolent
Association to the banning of the Communist Party during
what I regard as the fascist takeover of this country, to the
attempts to destroy the Black Panther Party.

The hypocrisy of Amerikan fascism forces it to conceal
its attack on political offenders by the legal fiction of con-
spiracy laws and highly sophisticated frame-ups. The masses
must be taught to understand the true function of prisons.
Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real under-
lying economic motive of crime and the official definition of
types of offenders or victims? The people must learn that
when one "offends” the totalitarian state it is patently not an

offense against the people of that state, but an assault upon
the privilege of the privileged few. ^

Could anything be more ridiculous than the language of
blatantly political indictments; “The People of the State
... vs. Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee” or “The People
of the State ... vs. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins.” What,
people? Clearly the hierarchy, the armed minority.

We must educate the people in the real causes of eco-
nomic crimes. They must be made to realize that even crimes
of passion are the psycho-social effects of an economic order
that was decadent a hundred years ago. All crime can be
traced to objective socio-economic conditions — socially pro-
ductive or counterproductive activity. In all cases, it is deter-
mined by the economic system, the method of economic
organization. “The People of the State . .. . vs. John Doe” is
as tenuous as the clearly political frame-ups. It’s like stating
“The People vs. The People.” Man against himself. Official
definitions of crime are simply attempts by the establishment
to suppress the forces of progress.

Prisoners must be reached and made to understand that
they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working
from within (while I’m here, my persuasion is that the war
goes on no matter where one may find himself on bourgeois-
dominated soil). The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and
the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of
revolutionary potential. Working alone and from within a
steel-enclosed society, there is very little that people like
myself can do to awake the restrained potential revolution-
ary outside the walls. That is part of the task of the “Prison
Movement.”

The “Prison Movement,” the August 7th movement
and ail similar efforts educate the people in the illegitimacy
of establishment power and hint at the ultimate goal of revo-
lutionary consciousness at every level of struggle. The goal
is always the same; the creation of an infrastructure capable
of fielding a people’s army.

Each of us should understand that revolution is aggres-
sive. The manipulators of the system cannot or will not meet

our legitimate demands. Eventually this will move us all into
a violent encounter with the system. These are the terminal
years of capitalism, and as we move into more and more
basic challenges to its rule, history clearly forewarns us that
when the prestige of power fails a violent episode precedes
its transformation.

We can attempt to limit the scope and range of violence
in revolution by mobilizing as many partisans as possible at
every level of socio-economic life. But given the hold that the
ruling class has on this country, and its history of violence,
nothing could be more certain than civil disorders, perhaps
even civil war. I don’t dread either. There are no good as-
pects of monopoly capital, so no reservations need be recog-
nized in its destruction. Monopoly capital is the enemy. It
crushes the life force of all of the people. It must be com-
pletely destroyed, as quickly as possible, utterly, totally,
ruthlessly, relentlessly destroyed.

With this as a common major goal, it would seem that
anti-establishment forces would find little difficulty in devel-
oping common initiatives and methods consistent with the
goals of mass society. Regretfully, this has not been the case.
Only the prison movement has shown any promise of cutting
across the ideological, racial and cultural barricades that
have blocked the natural coalition of left-wing forces at all
times in the past. So this movement must be used to provide
an example for the partisans engaged at other levels of strug-
gle. The issues involved and the dialectic which flows from
an understanding of the clear objective existence of overt
oppression could be the springboard for our entry into the
tide of increasing world-wide socialist consciousness.

In order to create a united left, whose aim is the defense
of political prisoners and prisoners in general, we must re-
nounce the idea that all participants must be of one mind,
and should work at the problem from a single party line or
with a single party line or with a single method. The reverse
of this is actually desirable. “From all according to ability.”
Each partisan, outside the vanguard elements, should work
at radicalizing in the area of their natural environment, the
places where they pursue their normal lives when not attend-

ing the rallies and demonstrations. The vanguard elements
(organized party workers of all ideological persuasions)
should go among the people concentrated at the rallying
point with consciousness-raising strategy, promoting com-
mitment and providing concrete, clearly defined activity.
The vanguard elements must search out people who can and
will contribute to the building of the commune, the infra-
structure, with pen and clipboard in hand. For those who
aren’t ready to take that step, a “packet” of pamphlets
should be provided for their education.

All of this, of course, means that we are moving, and on
a mass level: Not all in our separate directions — but firmly
under the disciplined and principled leadership of the Van-
guard Black Panther Communist Party. “One simply cannot
act without a head.” Democratic centralism is the only way
to deal effectively with the Amerikan ordeal. The central
committee of the people's vanguard party must make its
presence felt throughout the various levels of the overall
movement.

With the example of unity in the prison movement, we
can begin to break the old behavioral patterns that have
repeatedly allowed bourgeois capitalism, its imperialism and
fascism, to triumph over the last several decades. Wc tap a
massive potential reservoir of partisans for cadre work. We
make it possible to begin to address one of the most complex
psycho-social by-products that economic man with his pri-
vate enterprise has manufactured — Racism.

I’ve saved this most critical barrier to our needs of unity
for last. Racism is a matter of ingrained traditional attitudes
conditioned through institutions. For some, it is as natural
a reflex as breathing. The psycho-social effects of segregated
environments compounded by bitter class repression have
served in the past to render the progressive movement almost
totally impotent.

The major obstacle to a united left in this country is
white racism. There are three categories of white racists: the
overt, self-satisfied racist who doesn’t attempt to hide his
antipathy; the self-interdicting racist who harbors and nur-
tures racism in spite of his best efforts; and the unconscious

racist, who has no awareness of his racist preconceptions.

I deny the existence of black racism outright, by flat I
deny it. Too much black blood has flowed between the chasm /
that separates the races. It’s fundamentally unfair to expect
the black man to differentiate at a glance between the various
kinds of white racists. What the apologists term black racism
is either a healthy defense reflex on the part of the sincere
black partisan who is attempting to deal with the realistic
problems of survival and elevation, or the racism of the
government stooge organs.

As black partisans, we must recognize and allow for the
existence of all three types of racists. We must understand
their presence as an effect of the system. It is the system that
must be crushed, for it continues to manufacture new and
deeper contradictions of both class and race. Once it is de-
stroyed, we may be able to address the problems of racism
at an even more basic level. But we must also combat racism
while we are in the process of destroying the system.

The self-interdicting racist, no matter what his acquired
conviction or ideology, will seldom be able to contribute with
his actions in any really concrete way. His role in revolution,
barring a change of basic character, will be minimal through-
out. Whether the basic character of a man can be changed
at all is still a question. But ... we have in the immediacy
of the “Issues in Question” the perfect opportunity to test the
validity of materialist philosophy again, because we don’t
have to guess, we have the means of proof.

The need for Unitarian conduct goes much deeper than
the liberation of Angela, Bobby, Ericka, Magee, Los Siete,
Tijerina, white draft-resisters, and now the indomitable and
faithful James Carr.* We have fundamental strategy to be

* Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Gricka Huggins, Ruchell Magee. Los
Siete de la Raza are the seven Chicanos who were acquitted in San Fran-
cisco of the charge of killing a police officer, and who continue to be
harassed by the police. Reis Tijerina is a Chicane leader imprisoned for
his attempt to reassert Mexican-American ownership by right of treaty
grant to large tracts of land in the Southwest. James Carr was with George
Jackson during most of his years in prison. While on parole, he reportedly
attempted to come to George’s assistance during the violent aftermath of
the Solcdad Brothers’ hearing on April 6. He was arrested and now faces
the possibility of return to prison to complete his life sentence. — Ed.

proved — tested and proved. The activity surrounding the
protection and liberation of people who fight for us is an
important aspect of the struggle. But it is important only if
it provides new initiatives that redirect and advance the revo-
lution under new progressive methods. There must be a
collective redirection of the old guard — the factory and
union agitator — with the campus activist who can counter
the ill-effects of fascism at its training site, and with the
lumpenproletariat intellectuals who possess revolutionary
scientific-socialist attitudes to deal with the masses of street
people already living outside the system. They must work
toward developing the unity of the pamphlet and the silenced
pistol. Black, brown and white are all victims together. At
the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover
our new man, the unpredictable culmination of the revolu-
tionary process. He will be better equipped to wage the real
struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution — the
one for new relationships between men.

After the
Revolution
Has Failed

After the killing is done, the ruling class goes on about
the business of making profits as usual.

On

Withdrawal

syllogism, n. argument with two premises and a conclu-
sion; a logical scheme of a formal argument consisting of a
major and minor premise and a conclusion which must logi-
cally be true if the premises are true.

— M erriam - Webster

After revolution has failed, all questions must center on how
a new revolutionary consciousness can be mobilized around
the new set of class antagonisms that have been created by
the authoritarian reign of terror. At which level of social,
political and economic life should we begin our new attack?

First, we, the black partisans and their vanguard party,
the old and new left alike, must concede that the worker’s
revolution and its vanguard parties have failed to deliver the
promised changes in property relations or any of the institu-
tions that support them. This must be conceded without
bitterness, name-calling, or the intense rancor that is pres-
ently building. There have been two depressions, two great
wars, a dozen serious recessions, a dozen brush wars, crisis
after economic crisis. The mass psycho-social national cohe-
siveness has trembled on the brink of disruption and disinte-
gration repeatedly over the last fifty years, threatening to fly
apart from its own concentric inner dynamics. But at each
crisis it was allowed to reform itself; with each reform, revo-
lution became more remote. This is because the old left has
failed to understand the true nature of fascism.

We will never have a complete definition of fascism,
because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any
particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predomi-
nance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class. But if one
were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple
enough for all to understand, that word would be “reform."
We can make our definition more precise by adding the word
“economic." “Economic reform” comes very close to a
working definition of fascist motive forces.

Such a definition may serve to clarify things even
though it leaves a great deal unexplained. Each economic
reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be dis-
guised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses. Disguise
enters as a third stage of the emergence and development of
the fascist state. The modern industrial fascist state has
found it essential to disguise the opulence of its ruling-class
leisure existence by providing the lower classes with a mass
consumer’s flea market of its own. To allow a sizable portion
of the “new state" to participate in this flea market, the

ruling class has established currency controls and minimum
wage laws that mask the true nature of modern fascism.
Reform (the closed economy) is only a new way for capital-
ism to protect and develop fascism!

After the German SS agents or Italian Black Shirts kick
in the doors and herd Jews and Communist partisans to
death camps, after Peg-Leg White’s Black Legion terror and
the Guardians of the Republic* and their offspring legitimize
the in other words, after the fascists have succeeded

in crushing the vanguard elements and the threat they pose
is removed, the ruling class goes on about the business of
making profits as usual. The significance of the “new fascist
arrangement" lies in the fact that this busincss-as-usual is
accompanied by concessions to the degenerate segment of
the working class, with the aim of creating a buffer zotie
between the ruling class and the still potentially revolution-
ary segments of the lower classes.

Corporative ideals have reached their logical conclusion
in the U.S. The new corporate state has fought its way
through crisis after crisis, established its ruling elites in every
important institution, formed its partnership with labor
through its elites, erected the most massive network of pro-
tective agencies replete with spies, technical and animal, to
be found in any police state in the world. The violence of the
ruling class of this country in the long process of its trend
toward authoritarianism and its last and highest state, fas-
cism, cannot be rivaled in its excesses by any other nation on
earth today or in history.

With each advancement in the authoritarian process
and strengthening of the ruling class’s control over the sys-
tem, there was a corresponding weakening of the people’s
and workers’ movement.

And intellectuals still argue whether Anierika is a fas-
cist country. This concern is typical of the Amerikan left’s
flight from reality, from any truly extreme position. This is

•Probably the author is referring to the Guardians of Liberty, an
anti-Calholic, anti-immigrant group formed by ex-military officers and
civil servants in New York in 1911. Among its founders was Nelson A.
Miles, former chief of staff of the United States Army.

actually a manifestation of the authoritarian process seeping
into its own psyche. At this stage, how can anyone question j £
the existence of a fascist arrangement? Just consider the
awesome centralization of power, and the proven fact that
the largest part of the Gross National Product is in the hands
of a minute portion of the population.

Of course, the revolution has failed. Fascism has tempo-
rarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we
can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy
state and its ruling class. Compromises were made in the
thirties, the forties, the fifties. The old vanguard parties made
gross strategic and tactical errors. At the existential moment,
the last revelation about oneself, not many members of the
old vanguard choose to risk their whole futures, their lives,
in order to alter the conditions that Huey P. Newton de-
scribes as “destructive of life.”

Reformism was allowed. The more degenerate elements
of the working class were the first to succumb. The vanguard
parties supported the capitalistic war adventure in World
War II. Then they helped to promote the mass consumers’
market that followed the close of the war, the flea market
that muted the workers’ more genuine demands. Today we
are faced with a clearly different set of class antagonisms, the
complexities of a particularly refined fascist economic ar-
rangement, where the controlling elites have co-opted large
portions of the lowly working class.

When we ask ourselves, Where will we attack the enemy
state? we are answered, At the productive point. The next
logical question is, With whom and what will we attack the
fortified entrance of the productive and distributive system
in a nation of short-sighted, contented, conservative work-
ers? Obviously, the fascist movement is counterrevolution at
its very center. Fascist reformism is a calculated response to
the classic, scientific-socialist approach to revolution
through positive mobilization of the working classes. From
its inception, the fascist arrangement has attempted to create
the illusion of a mass society in which the traditional capital-
ist ruling class would continue to play its leading role. A
mass society that is not a mass society; a mass society of

authoritarians whose short-term material interests are per-
fectly suited to the development of the perfect totalitarian
state and centralized economy. The most precise definitions
of fascism involve the concept of “scientific capitalism,” or
“controlled capitalism," a sophisticated, totalitarian,
“learned” response to the challenge of egalitarian, scientific
socialism. After its successful establishment in Spain, Portu-
gal, Greece, South Africa and the United States of America,
we are faced with the obvious question of “how to raise a new
consciousness.”

Wc are faced with the task of raising a positive mobiliza-
tion of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has "gone
through" a contra-positive, authoritarian process.

The new vanguard elements seem to agree that with-
drawal from the enemy state and its social, political and
economic life is the first step toward its destruction. The new
vanguard elements seem to agree that the new revolutionary
consciousness will develop in the struggles of withdrawal.
However, after this point, agreement grows vague and is all
but lost in a sea of contradiction. The contention turns on
one primary question — the scope and range of violence
within the revolutionary process.

After the lengthy and clearly unnecessary ideological
battle that laid to rest a direct approach to revolution by the
white or black worker, we are now faced with an equally
unnecessary ideological battle over which of the various
communal (revolutionary cultural) approaches has the
stronger revolutionary validity.

The problem is compounded by the almost apolitical
withdrawal of the growing Weatherman faction, and their
estranged allies on campus to organic food gardens and a life
of sex, music and drugs. Their Nietzschean-Hegelian with-
drawal mimics the European historical experience of the last
five generations. In our equation, this must be considered the
minor side of the syllogism. Though revolution is in fashion,
the realistic, cohesive synergism seems as yet impossibly
remote.

On the other side of the equation, we have Huey New-
ton’s concept of black communes set well within the huge

population centers of the enemy state. This concept accepts
any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the
demands of the people and workers. These communes will be
tied to one another by a national and international vanguard
party and joined with the world’s other revolutionary soci-
eties. They are the obvious answer to all the theoretical and
practical questions and problems about an Amerikan revolu-
tion — a revolution that will be carried out principally by
blacks.

The question I’ve asked myself over the years runs this
way: Who has done most of the dying? Most of the work?
Most of the time in prison (on Max Row)? Who is the
hindmost in every aspect of social, political and economic
life? Who has the least short-term interest — or no interest at
all — in the survival of the present state? In this condition,
how could we believe in the possibility of a new generation
of enlightened fascists who would dismantle the basis of their
hierarchy?

Just how many Amerikans are willing to accept the
physical destruction of some parts of their fatherland so that
the rest of the land and the world might survive in good
health? How can the black industrial worker be induced to
carry out a valid worker’s revolutionary policy? What and
who will guide him? The commune. The central city-wide
revolutionary culture. But who will build the commune that
will guide the people into a significant challenge to property
rights? Carving out a commune in the central city will in-
volve claiming certain rights as our own — out front. Rights
that have not been respected to now. Property rights. It will
involve building a political, social and economic infrastruc-
ture, capable of filling the vacuum that has been left by the
establishment ruling class and pushing the occupying forces
of the enemy culture from our midst. The implementation of
this new social, political and economic program will feed and
comfort all the people on at least a subsistence level, and
force the "owners” of the enemy bourgeois culture either to
tie their whole fortunes to the communes and the people, or
to leave the land, the tools and the market behind. If he will
not leave voluntarily, we will expel him — we will use the

shotgun and the anti-tank rocket launcherll /

Who will build on an ideal that begins with force? The
vanguard party is now nation-wide. But vanguard parties
cannot build revolutions alone. Nor can a vanguard party
expect full party-line agreement before it moves in the direc-
tion of the people. Revolution is illegal. It’s against the law.
It’s prohibited. It will not be allowed. It is clear that the
revolutionary is a lawless man. The outlaw and the lumpen
will make the revolution. The people, the workers, will adopt
it. This must be the new order of things, after the fact of the
modern industrial fascist state.

In blacks, the authoritarian traits are mainly the effects
of terrorism and lack of intellectual stimulation. The com-
munal experience will redeem them. At present, the black
worker is simply choosing the less dangerous and com-
plicated strategy of survival. AH classes and all people are
subject to the authoritarian syndrome. It is an atavistic
throwback to the herd instincts. But it requires only the
proper trauma, the proper eco-sociological set of circumstan-
tial pressures to bring forth a revolutionary consciousness.

Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of
a morbid, traditional fear of both blacks and revolutions. The
resentment of blacks, and conscious or unconscious tenden-
cies to mete out pain to blacks, throughout the history of
Amerika’s slave systems, all came into focus when blacks
began the move from South to North and from countryside
to city to compete with whites in industrial sectors, and, in
general, engage in status competition. Resentment, fear, in-
security, and the usual isolation that is patterned into every
modern, capitalist industrial society (the more complex the
products, the greater the division of labor; the higher the
pyramid, the broader its base and the smaller the individual
brick tends to feel) are multiplied by ten when racism, race
antagonism, is also a factor. There is certainly no lack of
evidence to prove the existence of an old and built-in charac-
ter assassination of programmed racism (what class controls
the nation’s educational facilities, prints the newspapers and
magazines that carry the little cartoons, and omits or mis-
represents us to death?) has always served to distract and

defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge
sectors just above the black one. Then also to account for the
seemingly dual nature recognizable in the authoritarian per-
sonality (conformity, but also a strange latent destructive-
ness), racism has always been employed as a pressure release
for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people
historically processed to fear, to feel the need for a decision-
maker, to hate freedom.

The revolutionary is outlawed. The black revolutionary
“is a doomed man.” All of the forces of counterrevolution
stack up over his head. He’s standing in the tank-trap he has
dug. He lives in the cross hairs. No one can understand the
feeling but himself. “From the beginning" of his revolution-
ary consciousness he must use every device to stay alive.
Violence is a forced issue. It’s incumbent on him. The very
first political programs have had to be defended with duels
to the death. The children’s breakfast programs haven’t been
spared. The next round of commune building could cause the
third great war of the century.

We must build with the fingers of one hand wrapped
around a gun (an anti-personnel weapon). We cannot leave
the central city. This must be understood by the other revolu-
tionary people if we are to move together to conclusive ac-
tion.

The war will be fought in the nerve centers of the nation,
the cities where Angela was finally captured as she was at
work for the revolution, where Huey was found hiding and
working by the government’s propaganda apparatus.

We cannot withdraw from the cities. In order to com-
plete the revolutionary syllogism, the fascists must be forced
to withdraw. And under cover of the guns which force their
withdrawal, we will build the new black communes. A
BLADE IN THE THROAT OF FASCISM.

GEORGE JACKSON

Fascism

pj

Its most advanced form is here in Amerika.

Comrade John*

I’ve just finished rereading Angela’s analysis of fascism
(she’s a brilliant, “big,” beautiful revolutionary woman —
ain’t she!!). I’ve studied your letters on the subject carefully.
It could be productive for the three of us to get together at
once and subject the whole question to a detailed historical
analysis. There is some difference of opinion and interpreta-
tion of history between us, but basically I think we are
brought together on the principal points by the fact that the
three of us could not meet without probably causing World
War HI.

Give her my deepest and warmest love and ask her to
review these comments. This is not all that I will have to say
on the subject. I’ll constantly return to myself and reexam-
ine. I expect I will have to carry this on for another couple
of hundred pages. We’ll deal with the questions as they come
up, but for now this should provoke both of you to push me
on to a greater effort.

The basis of Angela’s analysis is tied into several old left
notions that are at least open to some question now. It is my
view that out of the economic crisis of the last great depres-
sion fascism-corporativism did indeed emerge, develop and
consolidate itself into its most advanced form here in
Amerika. In the process, socialist consciousness suffered
some very severe setbacks. Unlike Angela, I do not believe
that this realization leads to a defeatest view of history. An

*John Thorne, the author's lawyer.

understanding of the reality of our situation is essential to the
success of future revolutionizing activity. To contend that
corporativism has emerged and advanced is not to say that
it has triumphed. We are not defeated. Pure fascism, absolute
totalitarianism, is not possible.

Hierarchy has had six thousand years of trial. It will
never succeed for long in any form. Fascism and its historical
significance is the point of my whole philosophy on politics
and its extension, war. My opinion is that we are at the
historical climax (the flash point) of the totalitarian period.
The analysis in depth that the subject deserves has yet to be
done. Important as they are, both Wilhelm Reich’s and
Franz Neumann’s works* on the subject are limited. Reich
tends to be overanalytical to the point of idealism. I don’t
think Neumann truly sensed the importance of the antiso-
cialist movement. Behemoth is too narrowly based on the
experience of German National Socialism. So there is so
much to be done on the subject and time is running out. If
I am correct, we will soon be forced into the same fight that
the old left avoided.

6/20/71

It is not defeatist to acknowledge that we have lost a
battle. How else can we "regroup” and even think of carrying
on the fight. At the center of revolution is realism. To call
one or two or a dozen setbacks defeat is to overlook the
ebbing and flowing process of revolution, coming closer to
our calculations and then receding, but never standing still.
If a thing isn’t building, it must be decaying. As one force
emerges, the opposite force must yield; as one advances, the
other must retreat. There is a very significant difference be-
tween retreat and defeat. I am not saying that our parents
were defeated when I contend that fascist-corporativism
emerged and advanced in the U.S. At the same time it was
making its advance, it caused, by its very nature, an advance
in world-wide socialist consciousness: “When U.S. capital-

* The Mass Psychology of Fascism , by Wilhelm Reich; Behemoth: The
Structure and Practice of National Socialism, by Franz Neumann.

V 4 ism reached the stage of imperialism, the Western great pow-

ers had already divided among themselves almost all the
important markets in the world. At the end of World War
II when the other imperialist powers had been weakened, the
U.S. became the most powerful and richest imperialist
power. Meanwhile, the world situation was no longer the
same: the balance of forces between imperialism and the
socialist camps had fundamentally changed; imperialism no
longer ruled over the world, nor did it play a decisive role
in the development of the world situation" (Vo Nguyen
Giap).

In my analysis, I'm simply taking into account the fact
that the forces of reaction and counterrevolution were al-
lowed to localize themselves and radiate their energy here in
the U.S. The process has created the economic, political and
cultural vortex of capitalism’s last re-form. My views corre-
spond with those of all the Third World revolutionaries. And
nate in the seizure of state power. Our real purpose is to
redeem not merely ourselves but the whole nation and the
whole community of nations from colonial-community eco-
nomic repression.

The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of
all people’s government, all scientific-socialist mobilization
of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all unti-imperialist
activity on earth. The history of this country in the last fifty
years and more, the very nature of all its fundamental ele-
ments, and its economic, social, political and military mobili-
zation distinguish it as the prototype of the international
fascist counterrevolution. The U.S. is the Korean problem,
the Vietnamese problem, the problem in the Congo, Angola,
Mozambique, the Middle East. It’s the grease in the British
and Latin Amerikan guns that operate against the masses of
common people.

6/21/71

The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties
have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a
distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy’s slate-supported
and developed industries in 1922. Whole libraries have been

written around the subject. There have been a hundred
“party lines” on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marx-
ists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general
factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class
nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the
U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.

An exact definition of fascism concerns me because it
will help us identify our enemy and isolate the targets of
revolution. Further, it should help us to understand the
workings of the enemy’s methodology. Settling this question
of whether or not a mature fascism has developed will finally
clear away some of the fog in our liberation efforts. This will
help us to broaden the effort. We will not succeed until we
fully accept the fact that the enemy is aware, determined,
disguised, totalitarian, and mercilessly counterrevolutionary.
To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the
enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the
greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed.

Our insistence on military action, defensive and retalia-
tory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous
idealistic fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live.
Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles
require an armed people, a whole people, actively participat-
ing in the struggle for their liberty!

The final definition of fascism is still open, simply be-
cause it is still a developing movement. We have already
discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside
of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only
a discolored glimpse of a dead past.

No one will fully comprehend the historical implica^-
tions and strategy of fascist corporativism except the true
fascist manipulator or the researcher who is able to slash
through the smoke screens and disguises the fascists set up.
Fascism was the product of class struggle. It is an obvious
extension of capitalism, a higher form of the old struggle —
capitalism versus socialism. I think our failure to clearly
isolate and define it may have something to do with our
insistence on a full definition — in other words, looking for
exactly identical symptoms from nation to nation. We have

been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings.

We have failed to understand its basically international char-
acter. In fact, it has followed international socialism all
around the globe. One of the most definite characteristics of
fascism is its international quality.

6/22/71

The trends toward monopoly capital began effectively
just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its
emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have
been the predominant political force inside Amerikan so-
ciety. As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bour-
geois democracy faded in process. As monopoly capital
forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new cor-
porativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital
can in no way be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois
democracy. The forces of monopoly capital swept across the
Western world in the first half of this century. But they did
not exist alone. Their opposite force was also at work, i.e.,
“international socialism” — Lenin's and Fanon’s — national
wars of liberation guided not by the national bourgeois but
by the people, the ordinary working-class people.

At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is
international capitalism’s response to the challenge of inter-
national scientific socialism. It developed from nation to na-
tion out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s
dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism
is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the
fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the inde-
pendent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an
arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an at-
tempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy’s
rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revo- 4
lutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must
be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic
development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result
of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried — a
consciousness that was compromised. “When revolution
fails . . . it’s the fault of the vanguard parties."

It is clear that class struggle is ah ingredient of fascism.

It follows that where fascism emerges and develops, the anti-
capitalist forces were weaker than the traditionalist forces.
This weakness will become even more pronounced as fascism
develops! The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete de-
struction of all revolutionary consciousness.

6/23/71

Our purpose here is to understand the essence of this
living, moving thing so that we will understand how to move
against it.

This observer is convinced that fascism not only exists
in the U.S.A. but has risen out of the ruins of a once eroded

and dying capitalism, phoenixlike, to its most advanced and
logical arrangement.

One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tol-
erates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has
programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and
automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for
raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class
of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political
capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass par-
ticipatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the
debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle
based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture
that will triumph.

On May 14, 1787, the Constitutional Convention with
George Washington presiding officer, the work of framing
the new nation's constitution proceeded with fifty-five per-
sons and only two were not employers!!!

There have been many booms and busts in the history
of capitalism in this nation and across the Western Hemi-
sphere since its formation. The accepted method of pulling
the stricken economy out of its stupor has always been to
expand. It was pretty clear from the outset that the surplus
value factor eventually leads to a point in the business cycle
when the existing implementation of the productive factors
makes it impossible for the larger factor of production (la-
bor) to buy back the “fruits of its labor." This leads to what

has been erroneously termed “overproduction.” It is, in fact,
underconsumption. The remedy has always been to expand,
to search out new markets and new sources of cheaper raw
materials to recharge the economy (the imperialist syn-
drome).

Conflicts of interests develop, of course, between the
various Western nations and eventually lead to competition
for these markets. The result is always an ever-increasing
international centralization of the various capitalists’ elites,
world-wide cartels: International Telegraphic Unions (now
International Tele-communications Union), universal postal
union, transportation, agricultural, and scientific syndicates.
Before World War I there were forty-five or fifty such inter-
national syndicates, not counting the purely business cartels.
The international quality of capitalism is not happenstance.

It is clearly in the interests of the ruling class to expand and
unite. I am one Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Fanonist who does
not completely accept the idea that the old capitalist com-
petitive wars for colonial markets were actually willed by the
various rulers of each nation, even though such wars stimu-
lated their local economies and made it possible to promote
nationalism among the lower classes. War taken to the point
of diminishing returns weakens rather than strengthens the
participants, and if the rulers of these nations were anything
at all they were good businessmen. Expansion, then, which
often led unavoidably to war, was the traditional recourse in
the solving of problems created by a vacuous, uncontrollable
system, which never considered any changes in its arrange-
ment, its essential dynamics, until it came under a very real,
directly threatening challenge from below to its very
existence. Fascism in its early stages is a rearrangement of
capitalist implementation in response to a sharpening,
threatening, but weaker egalitarian socialist consciousness.

In regional or national economic crisis the traditional
remedies also include measures which stop just short of mas-
sive expansion on the international level. Traditional con-
trols short of expansion and war have always existed in the
form of government intervention, tariffs, public expenditure,

government export subsidy and limited control of the capital
market and import licenses, and monopolies have always
used government to help direct investment.

Classes

at

War

Mobilization and Contramobllliatlon

Enough time has passed now since the emergence of fascism,
the extreme crisis that precipitated it, and the hostilities that
caused its early development to view it with less of the color-
ing that sensationalism and war propaganda necessarily cre-
ate. We should now be able, after time has somewhat dulled
the traumatic exchanges of debate and struggle, to analyze
fascism objectively-its antecedents, its prime characteristics,
and its goals. In denying its ideological importance I am not
suggesting that all of its advocates (of the especially early
period) were opportunist or deranged individuals reacting to
a personal threat to their own situation within the society. A
great many of the early fascist intellectuals were responding
to a very real social situation. As intelligentsia, keepers of the
particular nation's system of values, art forms and political
thought, they felt it was their responsibility to attempt to
resolve a growing social problem. My insistence upon the
nonimportance of ideology indeed rests squarely upon this
point: that most of the fascist intellectuals were reacting to
the uprootedness and social disintegration of the particular
moment, and with each change in the face of this state of
affairs they were in large part forced to repudiate most of
their former ideology. Weight is given to this observation by
the fact that early fascism included an amalgam of expres-
sionists, anarcho-syndicalists, futurists, Hegelian idealists,
theoretical syndicalists, nationalists and, in the case of the
Spanish Falange, intellectual anarchists.

The whole theme of this early face of fascism was not
merely anti-communist but fundamentally a general indict-
ment of decadence, bourgeois decadance. Fascism also ab-
sorbed some socialists. In 1914 the Fasci di Azione
Rivoluzionaria formed itself out of a group of super-national-
ist patriots favoring Italian intervention in the war against
the Centra) Powers. Benito Mussolini, a leader of the ex-
treme syndicalist faction of the Socialist Party, supported
them vehemently in his newspaper II Popolo d'ltalia, and of
course this resulted in his expulsion from the party. In
March 1919, after the deep disillusionment and unrest
caused by the Italian participation in the war, Mussolini
formed the first real fascia. The intellectuals that supported
him did not do so out of a sense of the usual role of the
intellectual in society (i.e., to educate, to set the values of that
society) in a time of extreme social disintegration and eco-
nomic crisis. Men like Benedetto Croce and Arturo Tos-
canini, and others like Giovanni Gentile and Gabriele
D’Annunzio (one of Italy’s greatest poets), supported Mus-
solini almost out of desperation at what they felt to be a
destructive national breakdown. All four were elitist and
may have also felt that their status as intellectuals was also
threatened. Recall, the Russian revolution had shocked the
world to its foundations about this time. The general disre-
gard of the Socialist Party for any art form or scientific
activity that did not serve the state, and its tendency to
factionalize and procrastinate alienated many of the nation’s
top intellectuals.

But the final reason why the importance of ideology in
fascism must be denied is the fact that it exists in more than
one form. In fact, historically it has proved to have three
different faces. One “ out of power " that tends almost to be
revolutionary and subversive, anticapitalist and antisocialist.
One "in power but not secure'* — this is the sensational aspect
of fascism that we see on screen and read of in pulp novels,
when the ruling class, through its instrumental regime, is
able to suppress the vanguard party of the people’s and work-
ers’ movement. The third face of fascism exists when it is

“in power and securely so. ” During this phase some dissent
may even be allowed. In Italy, Trilussa the poet wrote and
published more bitter and biting satires attacking the politi-
cal regime than can be found in any of the so-called liberal-
democratic states. In April 1925, three years after the fascist
March on Rome, Benedetto Croce was able to publish a
clearly anti-fascist manifesto.

The finished product, the actual fascist arrangement, is
diametrically opposed to its original ideology. The regime
turns openly traditionalist and idiots like Mussolini receive
the favor and compliments of other idiots like President
Roosevelt, Bernard Shaw, Du Pont, Kennedy, and H.G.
Wells. This stems from an inevitable conflict between the
notion of a new spiritualistic man and the theory of the
ethical state. The ideals of obedience and creativity, author-
ity and freedom, are so contradictory of each other, so mutu-
ally exclusive, that the ideology of fascism could never be
taken seriously.

The pseudo-intellectual origins of fascism can be traced
alt the way back to ancient Greece. The German National
Socialist apologist Alfred Baumler and expressionist Gott-
fried Benn both recognized Hegel, as did some of the Italian
intellectuals and Eastern European fascists. The Western
Europeans, however, favored the primitive, withdrawn
ideals of Nietzsche or a confused combination of Nietzsche
and Hegel with a bit of Plato's philosopher king added for
window dressing. Actually, there have been as many differ-
ent fascist ideals and arrangements as there have been fascist
societies. Which brings us to the relevant point of inquiry.
The importance or form of a particular political regime can
never be understood simply as it stands alone. Its social and
economic past must be investigated and clearly defined
before the distinctive being of the political realm takes shape.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that Ger-
many and Italy reached nation-state status. Their heavy in-
dustrial sectors were rapidly expanding and coming into
conflict with the traditionalist economic sectors. Though
there were some clashes of interest within the extended
family of the ruling classes at the point of their emergence

into Western bourgeois culture, the section controlling the
largest share of the GNP in all cases finally succeeded in
gaining an even greater hold over the direction of the
economy, with class interest generally working a compro-
mise. The final result always involved a higher degree of
centralization of power and control. I term this contra-posi-
tive mobilization. It occurs when the capitalist industrial
sector of a particular society succeeds in altering the preexist-
ing equilibrium in its favor. The period in question was char-
acterized by the movement of masses from the traditional
agricultural sector into the sweat shops (large and medium)
of the cities. A policy was designed by this capitalist class to
limit the range of choices of the newly mobilized masses. But
“the specter of communism” was “haunting Europe.” The
working masses began to organize and exert increasing influ-
ence in the realm of politics. This we will term positive
mobilization.

So a three-sided political struggle opened the twentieth
century. Actually it was a two-sided struggle: the proletariat
against the ruling class. A multitude of conflicts existed
within the ruling class, particularly between the older tradi-
tionalist sectors and the manufacturing class. Within these
two factions there were a number of separate interest groups.
The corporative ideal had its roots in this conflict. Elitist,
conservative economists like Pareto theorized around such
concepts as “governing elites,” and “general equilibrium.”
The object of course was to diffuse the positive mobilization
of the working class. The system itself was ostensibly de-
signed to balance the interests of all economic classes and
substructurai groups. However in fact, its principal purpose
was to check the growth of the vanguard party’s influence on
the working class. In its beginning, especially in Italy, it was
too vague and difficult to control. General equilibrium was
never reached and class struggle went on unabated. Class
consciousness sharpened and the old bourgeois democratic
states, torn from within and in conflict with each other,
rushed toward their own ruin.

There is another form of mass mobilization that has

strong socio-economic significance. It lies between positive
and contra-positive mobilization. It involves the men who
were uprooted to serve in nation-state wars. Those who were
recruited from the agricultural sector generally gravitated to
the cities after their release, further dislocating the economy
in favor of the modern sector. The traditional agricultural
sector was forced to mechanize (modernize) and pull mar-
ginal land out of production. In some areas agriculture col-
lapsed altogether. The result was the need to import
foodstuffs and other agricultural products. This may or may
not have damaged the overall economy, but in any case it
represented another function turned over to the modern sec-
tor.

After World War I, international capitalism went
through an expansion phase of the business cycle. At its base
were the regenerative effects of war on capitalist production
and speculation. But the boom was brief. The great war had
taken the whole business of destruction of surplus to the
point of diminishing returns. The years 1920 to 1925 were
spent in recession and depression across the Western world.
The few years that followed — from 1925 to 1929 — business
“roared” back to recovery and expansion. Industrial manu-
facturing around the Western world and parts of the Third
World (Japan, Argentina, Brazil) increased by 25 percent.
The volume of world trade increased accordingly. However,
an increase in the arts of agricultural production, under the
strain to modernize without a corresponding increase in the
ability of the great laboring masses to buy back what was
being produced, precipitated a sharp fall in the price struc-
ture of foodstuffs in one of the world’s largest agricultural
centers, the United States. It was underconsumption (not
overproduction), and it led to the fatal stock market crash of
1929. The whole Western world went into recession and deep
depression.

Two countries were little affected by the general break-
down: Russia, which had taken itself off the wheel with a
successful socialist revolution, and Italy, which had estab-
lished a strong economic centralization that tended to close
her economy off from the other bourgeois states. Italy had

already established fascism shortly after World War I during
the 1920-25 economic crisis. That war had mobilized mil-
lions of Italians, most of whom were uprooted from overtra-
ditionalist sectors of the proletariat. They had gone through
the changes that most other Western countries were about to
adopt. The key element that made the economic policy of
fascist arrangements unique was the emphasis on "reform
through government intervention. " The opposite of Adam
Smith’s “invisible hand” working to coordinate economic
activity. The opposite of the French revolutionary battle cry
“laissez faire.”

Big business was in a crisis, of course, after the short
boom following World War I. The giant cartels and the
national industrial and financial monopolies were starved to
the bone in both periods of fascist rearrangements (the early
twenties and all of the thirties). This gave the movement its
seemingly middle-class antecedents. Where large-scale
manufacturing was not in complete control, its straining to
emerge as the dominant force within the economy was re-
sisted by the petit bourgeois, the landed classes and the
medium proprietor. Here we see fascism in its out-of-power
"stage one. ” We hear its language sounding deceptively an-
ticapitalist: “parasitic capitalism,” “illegitimate capital,”
“rapacious capital,” etc., etc. This was true in Italy and with
early fascism, in Falangist Spain and in Germany.

Mussolini, who set up the first successful fascist regime,
was a man trained all of his life in the revolutionary tactics
and strategy of scientific socialisml! His departure from the
international socialist movement dated from the moment he
gave his unreasonable support to a nation-state war in which
the working class of one or more nations was manipulated
into the murder of the working class of other nations by the
ruling classes of the respective states.

His opposition to the Socialist Partv and his participa-
tion in reformist capitalism were no doubt due to the faction-
alism and basically reformist attitude of the Socialist Party.
In spite of the fact that the Socialists won 156 seats in the
Chamber in the elections of 1919 (over 50 percent more than
the next largest political party, the Catholic Popular Party)

and won majorities in the councils of 2,202 communes and
26 provinces (there were 8,507 communes and 69 provinces)
in the general administration elections of the following year,
and in spite of the fact that the Socialist General Confedera-
tion of Labor had grown from 300,000 members before
World War I to almost 2.5 million members in 1920, the
Socialists still seemed powerless to solve the nation’s eco-
nomic problems with the promised revolution. In 1920 the
Socialist Party seized control of all the nation’s steel-
manufacturing plants but, incredibly, returned them to the
private interests. Several accounts claim that the workers
couldn’t run the plants — but if the makers of steel can't make
steel . . . ? Obviously it was a problem of direction and
management in the vanguard party. There were strikes, slow-
downs, lockouts and the kinds of disorders that precede
revolution (or counterrevolution). In the years following the
war and during the early depression of 1920-25 Italy could
have gone either socialist or fascist. There were partisans
enough in both parties to lead the uprooted, disintegrating
society into a new direction. The difference was in the nature
of the leadership, along with the question of who would be
willing to commit their whole fortunes and futures to the
battle.

Mussolini took his Black Shirt army and moved to the
fight killing and suppressing his opposition for the interests
of an alarmed industrial-traditionalist elite. He was well edu-
cated in the science of positive mobilization, which made him
the natural architect of a contra-positive mobilization in-
tended to diffuse the working-class movement. He “seized
power” in 1922 with the full support of the northern indus-
trialists, the petit bourgeois, and the older traditionalist
agrarian interests. The 1921 elections left his party with only
35 seats out of a possible 535 in the parliamentary body. But
by applying violence judiciously and scientifically as he had
learned from Lenin, he was able to force the abdication of the
king and the constitutional monarchy and form the first
political regime representing the new direction of capitalist
development. “Eyes right”— he pumped bullets into the old
left and new life into capitalism. The people were to exist

solely for the state (the ruling class). This was the very
antithesis of socialism. This period marked the "second face"
of fascism, "the dark night" when it was still insecure.

But it went on to develop a "closed economy" with
directed investment in public works projects. It proceeded to
fill the economic vacuum with surplus capital and super-
nationalism.

“Believe, fight, obey.” State-protected industries,
mainly in munitions and shipbuilding. Italy extended her
power facilities and opened new marginal agricultural land
for its new slaves. New educational facilities and new
"educators" (out of 1,250 university professors only twelve
refused to take the academics' oath of loyalty to the regime
in 1931) were also part of the reforms. Taken all together the
reforms turned out to be extreme reaction. The government
of 1870 had seized the papal states. The regime brought back
the old religion. In 1929, in spite of the unrewarding experi-
ences of World War I, the regime was allowed to make war
again in Africa, in Europe. This marked the "third face” of
fascism — in power and secure.

The point here is that fascism emerged out of weakness
in the preexisting economic arrangement and in the old left.
And the weakness must be assigned to the vanguard party,
not the people. The People’s Party failed to direct the masses
properly with positive suppression of their class enemies and
their goons, Mussolini was able to proclaim that fascism held
the only solution to the people’s problem — by default. Fas-
cism, the new arrangement, the rearrangement, the strength-
ening and reforming of laissez-faire competitive capitalism,
was antisocialist from its inception. It attempted to conceal
the reality of class struggle by disguising itself as a new
solution to “national problems," by deifying the interests of
the "whole state” — which turned out to be the interests only
of the state’s ruling classes.

Fascism is always a response to a threat to the establish-
ment. Any anti-establishment actions taken by the strictly
political arm of a forming fascist arrangement are simply
attempts to centralize or upstage the capitalist industrial
sector — either to establish it, as in Spain, or modernize it, as

in those cases where marginal productive interests are ab-
sorbed or destroyed by the arrangement. It is significant to
note that no fascist regime "in power" has advocated the
abolition of any form of private ownership. The fascist
regime and private ownership work hand in hand. No mod-
ern political regime can exist for long without the coopera-
tion of those who control the means of production.

The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level
are drawn from members of the lower-middle class who feel
the upward thrust of the lower classes more acutely. These
classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy re-
sulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect
their status first. They are joined by that sector of the work-
ing class which is backward enough to be affected by nation-
alistic trappings and the loyalty syndrome that sociologists
have termed the “authoritarian personality.” One primary
aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this
new pig class, to degenerate and diffuse working-class con-
sciousness with a psycho-social appeal to man’s herd in-
stincts. Development and exploitation of the authoritarian
syndrome is at the center of totalitarian capitalism (fascism).
It feeds on a small but still false sense of class consciousness
and the need for community. The collective spirit in fascism
is a morbid phenomenon that grows out of the psychopathol-
ogy of mob behavior.

With each development in the fascist arrangement, the
marriage between the political elite and economic elite
becomes more apparent. The integration of the various sec-
tors of the total economic elite becomes more pronounced.
The Rumanian Iron Guard was no exception. It would have
eventually bedded down with the “owners” and “financiers”
and integrated the archaic sectors of the traditionist capital-
ist elites with the modern sectors had it not encountered the
Red Army.

The generals and colonels of the various Latin Ameri-
kan fascist regimes are attempting contra-positive mobiliza-
tion and functioning as an instrument to balance the interests
of the traditionalist with the more modern sectors of the

neo-colonial nations. It is very misleading to regard them as
the "ruling class” of such nations, or to consider them as part
of a populistic movement. As in Rumania and Spain, state
intervention simply serves the best interests of a diminishing
capitalist ruling class by restructuring it and destroying the
people’s labor movement. Capitalist political regimes cannot
exist of their own. Without the support of government, capi-
talism simply could not prevail. Peron was a fascist. The
peace he worked out between labor and "owner” was subtle
and disguised but nonetheless fascist in that it appeased and
diffused the worker’s resentment of the nonworker and
effected a quite efficient counter-positive mobilization. Peron
maintained an apparent popular appeal throughout his years
as head of state because of the vanguard party’s willingness
to settle for reformism and tokens in a less than junior part-
ner relationship with capital. His arrangement of the fascist
state was indeed singular. Like the U.S.A., the original struc-
ture of the society in which he had to work his scientific
manipulations had only one available sector large enough
and uprooted enough (without strong left direction) to carry
his movement — labor. Peron the fascist found his strongest
support in labor. He was finally deposed when he lost the
favor of the economic elite. At heart all fascist manipulators
are elitist and revere private ownership. They are backward
and reactionary to the ultimate extreme of self-destruction.
Peron might have held on to his position had he chosen to
serve the laboring class honestly and make it a genuine power
base for the society — one which truly embraced their inter-
ests — by nationalizing the productive facilities and turning
them over to labor’s management. But fascists would rather
die or flee than support the total revolution. So they must be
slain)

The very first step in establishing the “whole interest of
the state,” the combine, the corporate state, is to dismantle
the working-class movement and replace it either with a
state-controlled organ or no organization at all. The corpo-
rate laws passed in Italy in 1934 served only to sanction the
complete destruction of the proletarian movement. At the

same time they set up an automatic defense mechanism
against future labor activity. In disputes, labor was repre-
sented by men sworn either to the state or without the skill
and intelligence to effect labor’s demands. The manufactur-
ing class had long since literally married into the regime. In
Italy the fascist party cadre spread throughout the nation
organizing people left aimless by the failure of the positive
mobilization of the socialist vanguard parties: people who
had dropped out, defected; people who became uprooted and
unemployed either by the war or the deflated economy. This
organizing must be considered contra-positive mobilization
in that its intent was to inflate the capitalist economy and
deflate the worker’s and people’s influence and control over
the economy. With easy credit, inflationary financing, and
increased government sponsorship of public works projects,
fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan succeeded in recon-
structing capitalist productive institutions and traditional
property relations. After the takeover, Italy recovered rap-
idly from the 1920-25 postwar depression. The ordinary
complexities created by inflationary budgeting did not im-
mediately manifest themselves because of the preexisting
state of the economy. The untapped productive factors —
capital and labor — were grinding to a standstill. Cost of
living and cost of production under those circumstances did
not immediately rise to the point of crisis (diminishing re-
turns for capital, decrease in real wages of labor). Later in
both Italy (1925-26) and Germany (1937-38) this inflation-
ary budgeting showed damaging trends and set olT a chain
reaction in Germany that may have eventually led to its
downfall. However, the heart of the fascist economy is an
attempt at control through centralization: monopoly capital
control, price fixing, wage freezes, and carefully balanced
foreign trade.

The first currency crisis stimulated by Italy’s inflation-
ary policies (initiated in 1925) resulted in the stabilizing of
the lira by decree in 1927. A controlled deflationary period
followed, effected through the banking systems which the
regime influenced by decree or advice. Private interests pro-
tected themselves from totally destructive competition by

using the regime as referee. After the Great Depression and ■
the international rise of fascist states by default, refinements
in its simple currency control methods were introduced. The
replacement of competition with cooperation among the pri-
vate interests became more standardized. The Germans real-
ized that inflationary currency control would have little real
effect on the expansion of heavy industry without also con-
trolling the capital market. Direction of investment was also
a key factor in the arrangement. Again, the regime func-
tioned as a centralizing, mitigating influence. Real wages
began to fall and industrial production rose. Considered
against the Gross National Product, investment rose 25 per-
cent by 1937 in Germany. The same 25 percent figure held
true for Japan in the middle and late thirties. From 15 per-
cent of GNP at the lowest point of the Great Depression in
fascist Italy, annual average investment in industry rose to
19 or 20 percent in the years 1936-40. Because Italian fas-
cism was already established when the entire Western capital
market’s banking system failed, there was a sizable amount
of quasi-government ownership. The "Industrial Recon-
struction Institute" established by the regime was quite sim-
ply a financial institution, a huge bank. It also indirectly
owned or influenced large sectors of the nation's heavy in-
dustry — a further hint at an upward thrust of the middle
classes to fill in sections of the traditional ruling class de-
stroyed by the forces of the business cycle. In general, the
developments and experiments in controlled capitalism re-
sulted in a concentration of economic power in the large
monopolies. The crisis in German foreign exchange mur-
dered the small businessman. Small agricultural units tended
to disappear because of low wages, low consumption and
large increases in the arts of agricultural production. The
necessity for government intervention increased as the inter-
ests of the private elites generated new tensions. The break-
down of the big industrial pattern into sections, the regula-
tion or elimination of real competition except, of course, for
labor when it was short, and the control of labor organiza-
tions basically comprised the whole of the new fascist “eco-

nomic arrangement” which attempted to reduce the vast
strata of classes and class interests of the preexisting state of
the economy to just the two principal classes — the haves and
the have-nots.

The psycho-social dimensions of fascism become quite
complex, but they can be simplified by thinking of them as
part of a collective bargaining process carried on between all
the elites of the particular state with the regime acting as
arbitrator. The regime’s interests are subject to those of the
ruling class. Labor is a partner in this arrangement. At the
head of any labor organization in the fascist state, there is an
elite which is tied to the interests of the regime — and conse-
quently tied also to the economic status quo.

.The trappings of this pseudo mass society are empty,
cheap, spectacular leisure sports; parades where strangers
meet, shout each other down and often trample each other
to death on the way home; mass consumption of worthless
super-suds or aspirin; ritualistic, ultra-nationalistic events on
days to glorify the idiots who died at war or other days to
deify those who sent them out to die, A mass society that is
actually a mass jungle.

At its core, fascism is capitalistic and capitalism is inter-
national, Beneath its nationalist ideological trappings, fas-
cism is always ultimately an international movement.

Many of the fascist regimes that failed or lacked thrust
— the Belgian Rexists, the Dutch N.S.B. (National Socialist
Movement) Japan’s arrangement, Rumania’s Iron Guard —
were all essentially too imitative and inflexible. Even the
totalitarians must be supple and responsive if they are to
survive. Peronism was imitative as was the Brazilian inte-
gratistas. They were emulating their colonial masters in the
U.S.A. So one fascist regime falls to another more efficient
fascist regime.

Two factors must be seriously considered when analyz-
ing the two largest fascist states in Latin Amerika — Brazil
and Argentina. Their dependence on foreign trade and their
neo-colonial status, which involves dependence on “foreign
investment.” When exports fall as they did during the
depression of the thirties, the value of the national currency

must also fall, and it follows that imports automatically de-
crease. The battle to balance payments begins, necessitating
massive governmental intervention which leads inexorably
to inflationary domestic economic policy and sometimes to
a conflict of interest with the ruling class of the parent nation.
Concern for balance of payments determines internal eco-
nomic motives. The deficit financing, the attempt to control
incomes (by controlling labor), price fixing, government
stockpiling of agricultural surpluses, positive direction of
investment and the balancing of the interests of the dualistic
economy’s elites can all be pointed to as evidence of an
attempt to employ the centralist controls that characterize
the classic fascist arrangement.

The first fascist regime of Brazil was headed by Vargas.
It lasted from 1930 to 1945. Coffee exports formed 70 percent
of the nation’s GNP prior to Vargas’ takeover and the
Depression. When international trade (especially in agricul-
tural goods) collapsed, Vargas was forced to attempt experi-
ments with the so-called closed economy. New internal
markets had to be created, investment and motives relocated,
industrialization attempted. But all of this planning, though
successful to an extent, was still basically imitative and did
not accurately reflect the realities of the nation’s inability to
accumulate capital.

It is extremely important not to confuse the three faces
of fascism when studying Latin Amerika. The second phase
(in power but not secure) is the really significant part of the
whole fascist episode. Regime after regime has failed to in-
crease internal demand or unseat the traditionalist landed
elite in favor of the small industrial interests; this means a
permanent dependence on foreign trade and investment for
machine tools, for weapons to control the people’s move-
ments, and for raw materials to feed their light industries and
flea markets. Consequently we see these areas as the most
glaring dichotomy of socio-economic injustice. In the
shadow of their plush beach resorts which attract degener-
ates from all over the Western world, literally within rifle
shot, live the people who service these vacation-resort com-
plexes in disease-infested corrugated tin shanties on hillsides

constantly ravaged by mudslides. A strange combination of
the first two phases of fascism. Without the massive military
aid of the United States, Gestapo "death squads,” and the
most intensive rightist terror, the guns of liberation would by
now have certainly filled the streets and forests with blood
“to the horse’s brow.” It is important never to lose sight of
Latin Amerika’s neo-colonial status, A victory for the peo-
ple’s liberation armies entails a victory over international
capitalism and especially a victory over their colonial mas-
ters. The puppet regimes of these areas cannot move firmly
into phase three of the fascist arrangement for two reasons.
The people are willing to use arms and are learning to use
them more effectively, and because the regimes are imitative,
not indigenous, they do not reflect the real interests of the
nations’ elites, but rather the interests of the ruling elites of
the parent imperial nation, the U.S.A.

Germany attempted to rearm, deflate its currency, and
at the same time continue to meet the war-swollen demands
of heavy industry. It finally fell of its own weight. The fascist
economic arrangement failed under the pressure of war in
Germany, in Austria, in Italy and Japan, as later it failed the
first regimes in Brazil and Argentina. The principal failing
was very much the same that brought down laissez faire. The
capitalist business cycle cannot be controlled. Inflationary
spasmodic attacks, regional recession and depression pursue
capitalism in all its forms like a nemesis, break its spirit,
reduce its top-heavy bureaucratic backbone to jelly. Infla-
tion, at first the key to regeneration after an extended col-
lapse, ultimately leads to complex problems that seem to be
beyond regulatory remedy. To control it by compressing
wage demands always turns out to be politically unsound.

Class consciousness in Germany was better developed
than in any other European nation before and after the fas-
cist takeover, so consciousness "alone” is obviously not the
factor that determines which way a disintegrating society
will develop — fascist or socialist. The task of defusing the
people’s labor movement and balancing it in favor of the few
special individual heavy industrial firms (Reichswerke-Her-

mann Goring-Krupp) and the vital interests of the increas-
ingly important chemical industry (I. G. Farben, etc.), fell to
the regime-sponsored Labor Front. Its first attempt to ap-
pease labor came in the form of slightly improved working
conditions, meaningless slogans like "Strength through Joy"
which echoed the Anglo-Amerikan work ethic. Even after
the forcible suppression of the vanguard party by the Ges-
tapo in the first years of the regime, the potential political
power of labor (due to the workers’ importance in the pro-
duction of heavy armaments) was such that really effective
measures for controlling it were not devised throughout the
tenure of the Third Reich. Wage increases couldn’t be
avoided. Rigorous state controls replaced mild repression
and propaganda only after the Sudentenland affair of 1938
and the accentuated armaments drive of 1939. Because
wages could not be successfully held down (the individual
firms were after profits, bear in mind; consequently they
devised many indirect incentives designed to attract a shrink-
ing labor market), measures were taken to limit the move-
ment of laborers from place to place, and the other factors
of production were openly channeled into the armament
sectors by stringent government intervention. All idealistic,
ideological pretenses were dropped. Racism and the interests
of the military-industrial complex formed the economic and
psycho-social motives of the society and shook it apart.

The German economy was already in ruins by the time
the Reich expanded into Russia. This expansion itself was a
symptom of the economy’s death-directed lack of discipline.
Its own internal contradictions and deceits destroyed it. An
industrial-military-based economy must expand to live, must
forcibly balance trade in its favor to survive. No amount of
logic or dissent can influence the men who have vested inter-
ests in the life of such an arrangement! Only organized vio-
lence and armed struggle could have stopped them before
they lost their minds and destroyed so many lives. The coun-
ter-terrorism of the socialist parties’ vanguard and the proper
direction of the people’s consciousness could have changed
the whole course of history over the last fifty years. Once
fascism moves into its third phase and contra-positive mobil-

ization (the psycho-social antithesis of lower-class mobiliza-
tion) insinuates itself technologically with weapons and
control of the means of the people's subsistence, limiting
their vision to their own personal short-term interests with
propaganda and empty promises, "only he who does not fear
death of one thousand cuts" can then unseat the Fuehrer.

The United States was not existing in a vacuum when
fascism first swept the Western world on the heels of two
great depressions. My reading of history indicates that the
U.S. was in greater economic, social, and political crisis after
the 1929 stock market crash than any other Western country
excepting possibly Germany. The same trends, the same ex-
periments, the same internal battles were fought by the same
forces for the direction of the nation’s economy. The extreme
economic crisis of the early thirties brought working-class
revolutionary consciousness to its very peak. All serious
commentary on this period reflects a profound lack of confi-
dence in the workability of capitalism. This avalanche of
criticism came from sectors of the middle- and right-oriented
thinkers as well as the left — just as it did in Italy, Germany,
Rumania and the other fascist storm centers. But of course
the middle and rightist intellectuals were thinking in terms
of a new direction for capitalist growth, not in its abolish-
ment — a "New Deal,” much like those of Nazi, Fascist, and
Falangist Europe. No serious or honest student could miss
the likeness. F.D.R. was a fascist. His stated, documented
congratulatory messages to Mussolini were not simply diplo-
matic gestures. Joseph Kennedy’s advice to England to sur-
render to German expansion did not necessarily originate in
Kennedy’s mind. He was official ambassador of the U.S. to
England.

There was positive mobilization of workers and the
lower class, and a highly developed class consciousness.
There was indeed a very deep economic crisis with attendant
strikes, unionizing, lockouts, break-ins, call-outs of the Na-
tional Guard. The lower class was threatening to unite under
the pressure of economic disintegration. Revolution was in
the air. Socialist vanguard parties were leading it. There was
terrorism from the right from groups such as Guardians of

the Republic, the Black Legion, Peg-leg White-type storm
troopers and hired assassins who carried out the beginnings
of a contra-positive suppressive mobilization. Under the
threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory,
became all the more co-optive and dangerous. F.D.R. was
born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role was to
form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political
and labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism
— his role was to limit competition, replace it with the dream
of cooperation; to put laissez faire to rest, and initiate the
acceptance of government intervention into economic affairs.

A great many of the early trends of Amerikan history
prepared the way for the ultimate success of fascism in its
highest form. From the very beginning of Amerika’s exist-
ence as an independent nation-state there were localized la-
bor organizations that attempted to further the interests of
their class by influencing the social, political and economic
life of the new nation. It wasn’t until the second half of the
nineteenth century that labor took on a national character
and began to make its presence felt in the economic life of
the nation. Even then, it was resisted by the violence of
employers and government working together. Marx’s defini-
tion of history as a broken, twisted, sordid spectrum of class
struggles is substantiated by Amerikan labor history. The
earliest significant struggles between labor and capital began
in the 1790s on the East Coast in cities like New York,
Philadelphia and Baltimore where mutual-aid craft societies
attempted to gain higher wages and shorter working hours.
Resistance from employers and their backers in government
to these mild organizational efforts forced the establishment
of the first trade unions, the Philadelphia Printers Union, the
New York Typographical Union of 1794, Journeymen Cabi-
net and Chair Makers of 1796. The first wage strike was
organized by the Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoe-
makers) of Philadelphia. It lasted ten or eleven weeks in 1799
and was broken by right-wing terrorist activity.

The laying to rest of laissez faire, the shackling of Adam
Smith’s “invisible hand,’’ really began during the Civil War

in the U.S. The petit-bourgeois dream of countless contend-
ing private proprietorships somehow managing a mellifluous
blending of private and state interests — when long-range
plans could still be made by wage workers to be proprietors
one day — became a nightmare with the advent of the mass
manufacturing process. At the opening of the Civil War, the
U.S. was ranked fourth among the world’s industrial states
behind the English empire, the German states and France.
By 1870 the U.S. industrial manufacturing plant had dou-
bled the value of its products. The number of factory workers
drawn out of other sectors of the economy caused the indus-
trial work force to nearly double during this same period.
Improvements in the arts of agricultural production drew
some workers from the countryside and sent others west-
ward toward the closing frontier. The craftsman lost his
privileged economic position with the appearance of newly
invented mass production machinery. This new machinery
and the factory setup-in general made individual workers
more expendable and made it possible to reduce their share
of the profits. By the mid- 1890s the U.S. was producing
one-third of the world’s manufactured goods, and was on its
way to becoming first among the world’s industrial states.

The expansion of U.S. industry out of the demands of
the Civil War involved a complex concentration of several
violent and predictable capital mandates. The old traditional
sector of the landed aristocracy was broken; machine tools,
transport, and communications boomed (the basis of the
industrial state and, of course, an industrial elite, when raw
materials — coal, iron and other ores — are not lacking); the
price or value of labor shrank; and the “drive” toward
monopoly accumulation was firmly established.

This period of capital accumulation, invention of new
machinery, its use in expanding factory setups, the “closed
economy” created by Republican government legislation,
and the direction of certain amounts of capital through
government contract were in part the beginnings of a new
chapter in the authoritarian process of Western history. In-
dustrial centralization, I mean the refined tactics of monopo-

lized capitalism, may have been developed right here in the
U.S.lt 4

This is the logical place to question some of the old left’s
historical assumptions about the last hundred years of life.
Analysts of the old left are completely confused by the differ-
ences between bourgeois democracy and monopoly capita!
and their manifestations on the Amerikan scene. They seem
to feel that both can coexist in the same society. Actually one
simply grows out of the other. Monopoly capital is the cen-
tral objective of corporative fascism. Prior to the Civil War
and the emergence of the trends toward monopoly capital,
Amerika was dominated by bourgeois democratic economics
and political rule. The economy was based upon the diverse
ownership of many thousands of factory units and a political
arrangement to reflect that fact.

However, with the emergence and expansion of
monopoly capital after the economic impetus of the Civil
War, bourgeois democracy naturally began to fade. Bour-
geois democracy, the political rule of the bourgeoisie, simply
cannot exist after the emergence of monopoly capital.
Monopoly capital has its own political expression. It devel-
ops as bourgeois democratic political rule declines.

The roots of corporativism-fascism were laid with the
expansion of monopoly capital into the giant cartels, corpo-
rations and interlocking trusts. The owners of the largest
share of a nation’s GNP will always control the political life
and government of the state. Monopoly capital is corpora-
tivism (fascism!).

I don’t think anything that ever happened in Italy,
Spain, Germany or any of the other capitalist states can
match the centralizing process that the U.S. went through in
the last hundred years. Even the so-called public utilities
(A.T. & T., the Santa Fe, the Pennsylvania RR, Western
Electric, Western Union) are owned by financial institutions
that, on examination, always turn out to be controlled by f
few families who are descendants of the industrial expansion-
ists of 1865-95.

The traditional Anglo-Saxon concept of law (founded
on the latent principle that the haves must always be pro-
tected from the have-nots), though it did not attack labor as
openly as in England, effectively prohibited the emergence of
any really strpng labor movement until the close of the nine-
teenth century. It did not prevent the war-profiteering Rock-
efeller petroleum combination from forming. It didn’t stop
Western Union from taking over the telegraph industry. It
didn’t stop Samuel Slater and the "Boston Associates” from
tying up all the New England textile interests. The transcon-
tinental railroad hookup (May 19, 1969 — Union Pacific and
Central Pacific) could have never been accomplished without
government and commercial cooperation. Corruption and
lawlessness were the basis of their commercial success, but
no one was charged or punished by law. Any individual, on
the other hand, who joined with someone else to effect an
increase in his wage was guilty of conspiracy. That same law
is still used to protect the same interests today. Anglo-Saxon
law supported F.B. Gowen of the Philadelphia and Reading
Railroad and its coal subsidy in cutting wages and breaking
unions, just as it supported the KKK in reconstructing
Southeastern U.S., King of the Baltimore and Ohio, Tom
Scott of the Pennsylvania, William Vanderbilt of the New
York Central. Every time I hear the word “law” I visualize
gangs of militiamen or Pinkertons busting strikes, pigs wear-
ing sheets and caps that fit over their pointed heads. I see a
white oak and a barefooted black hanging, or snake eyes
peeping down the lenses of telescopic rifles, or conspiracy
trials.

1. Mankind is biologically sick.

2. Politics is the irrational expression of this sickness.

3. Whatever takes place in social life is actively or passively,
voluntarily or involuntarily, determined by the structure
of masses of people.

4. This character structure is formed by socio-economic
processes, and it anchors and perpetuates these processes.
Man's biopathic character structure is, as it were, the
fossilization of the authoritarian process of history. It is
the biophysical reproduction of mass suppression.

5. The human structure is animated by the contradiction
between an intense longing for and fear of freedom.

6. The fear of freedom of masses of people is expressed in
the biophysical rigidity of the organism and the inflexibil-
ity of the character.

7. Every form of social leadership is merely the social ex-
pression of the one or the other side of this structure of
masses of people . . .

— W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Revolutionary change always involves the complete altera-
tion of the structure of property relations and the institu-
tional substructures that support them. It leads from
hierarchy to mass society.

The ruling class in the U.S. is composed of one million
men and their families — the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Mor-
gans, Mellons, Du Ponts, Hunts and Gettys, Fords and their
minions and dependents. They use the ivy League universi-
ties and elite law schools as private schools for their offspring
and as training grounds for their corporate hirelings. They
rule with iron precision through the military, the C.I.A., the
F.B.I., private foundations and financial institutions. Their
control of all the media of education and communication
comprises an extremely effective system of thought control.
At the time when this ruling class was forming a hundred
years ago, the International Working Men’s Party supported
strikes that asked only for reformist measures, although it
was aware, even at that time, that reform was not the solu-
tion and it quietly advocated the seizure of the materials of
production. The dichotomy between the longing for true
freedom and the fear of its responsibility was apparent even
then. Early radicals excused themselves by claiming that

they were “exploiting the inherent contradictions of
monopoly capital." They hoped that the masses would spon-
taneously awaken to the fact that capitalism had grown deca-
dent. But capitalism reformed itself, apologized to no one,
and went on to build a network of national and international
centralization that stands unrivaled by any hierarchy past or
present.

Reformism is an old story in Amerika. There have been
depressions and socio-economic political crises throughout
the period that marked the formation of the present upper-
class ruling circle and their controlling elites. But the parties
of the left were too committed to reformism to exploit their
revolutionary potential.

The latest round of capitalism reform, the latest redirec-
tion of its energy, was its highest and last form. The struggles
of the thirties, forties and fifties completed the totalitariani-
zation of the country and perfected the system of total mass
social deception. I’ve had learned men tell me that controlled
capitalism, monopoly capital, fascism, corporativism, or
whatever your vernacular, is a form of “welfare-state-ism. "
This is precisely what we were intended to believe: that the
political takeover by monopoly capital was actually an ad-
vance in the welfare of the common people. Even the old left
promotes the lie that valid concessions have been made by
the ruling class, as if deceptively better working conditions
and illusory wage increases were Marxism. A true Marxist
revolution abolishes the wage system. The true welfare state
would be the final and highest stage of social development,
where the world and the state are one, where the material
and psychological needs of the masses have been met and
political regimes have ceased to exist. The New Deal and the
resulting military industrial complex as welfare-state-ism —
I swear I’ll strangle the next idiot who repeats that line.

All the ingredients for a fascist state were already pres-
ent: racism, the morbid traditional fear of blacks, Indians,
Mexicans; the desire to inflict pain on them when they began
to compete in industrial sectors. The resentment and the
seedbed of fear is patterned into every modern capitalist
society. It grows out of a sense of insecurity and insignifi-

cance that is inculcated into the workers by the conditions
of life and work under capitalism. This sense of vulnerability
is the breeding ground of racism. At the same time, the ruling
class actively promotes racism against the blacks of the lower
classes. This programmed racism has always served to dis-
tract the huge numbers of people who subsist at just a slightly
higher level than those in a more debased condition (in the
1870s the strikes frequently ended in anti-Chinese or anti-
black lynchings). It conforms to dual requirements of the
authoritarian personality (conformity accompanied by com-
pulsive sadism). Racism has served always in the U.S. as a
pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced
by a people made fearful and insecure by a way of life they
never understood and resented from the day of their birth.

In the U.S., World War II was the principal cause of the
total breakdown of the working-class movement and its revo-
lutionary consciousness, which had been built up by the
crisis years of the thirties and all that went before them.
Lesser attempts at suppression had been made prior to the
war through the typical reformist policies of modern fascist
regimes. The economy had been closed, banks- regulated,
deficit spending had been practiced on projects like TV A and
CCC. The arms race that eventually culminated in the fascist
military-industrial-complex-based economy broke the closed
economic ideal. Two conditions distinguished the successful
establishment of fascism in this country. The old vanguard
parties copped out and supported a nation-state ruling-class
war which wasted the blood and energy of their proletariats.
At the time, resistance to the war would have seemed like
simple common sense. If Stalin gave the order to support the
U.S. war effort, he was a fool. In any case, the old vanguards’
support should have been for the people’s struggle inside the
U.S.

With a little more patience and sacrifice, Stalin could
have eventually marched to the Atlantic, With all of Europe
in ruins and the German economy already in its final stages
of disintegration with the U.S. presence in Europe, capital-
ism could be dead today. Instead, U.S. imperalism rose to
behemoth proportions. After the war, international markets

opened in Europe, Africa and Asia with the flea market of
radios, TVs and novelties here at its center. For the sake of
these trinkets and baubles, the labor elites diffused the right-
eous demands of the people. Consensus politics formed as a
result of their defection simply solidified the totalitarian
regime with all the opinion-molding facilities under the rul-
ing classes. Elections and political parties have no signifi-
cance when all serious contenders for public office are fascist
and the electorate is thoroughly misled about the true nature
of the candidates. One cannot say all the people who vote are
unaware, just as one cannot say the twelve hundred profes-
sors who backed Mussolini were all frightened. Those who
are aware and still do nothing constructive are among the
most pathetic victims of the totalitarian process.

The necessary shock troops and tools for creating the
false contra-positive psycho-social basis of a fascist-type
pseudo-society were in short supply in this country prior to
and during the process of the fascist takeover. There was
little of this consciousness among the middle classes, so the
first terror came from the specially formed and hired goons
of the Du Ponts and Rockefellers, the Black Legion, the
Guardians of the Republic, the F.B.I. They destroyed the
already disintegrating vanguard, leaving the degenerate ele-
ments of the working class as the only available mass. Class
relations were slowly altered as a result of this action by the
co-opted labor sectors. Government agents were sent to infil-
trate scattered labor movements. The disguise was complete.
The satisfaction of labor's short-term economic interests was
made possible by the giant consumers' market and the mili-
tary complex. Ties were formed between rulers and labor
leaders. The elites of the proletarian movement were com-
promised. A ruling class and its governing elites were cen-
tralized and were carefully co-optive. A fascist arrangement!
Death and prison for all who object — fascism in its final and
secure state. It has happened here. And the only recourse is
an appeal to arms. The corporative state allows for no genu-
inely free political opposition. They only allow meaningless
gatherings where they can plant more spies than partici-
pants. They feel secure in their ability to mold the opinion

of a people interested only in wages. However, real revolu-
tionary activity will draw panic-stricken gunfire. Or heart
attacks.

So what is to be done after a revolution has failed? After
our enemies have created a conservative mass society based
on meaningless electoral politics, spectator sports, and a 3
percent annual rise in purchasing power strictly regulated to
negate itself with a corresponding rise in the cost of living.
What is to be done about an expertly, scientifically calculated
contra-positive mobilization of the entire society? What can
we do with a people who have gone through the authoritar-
ian process and come out sick to the corelll

There will be a fight. The fight will take place in the
centra] cities. It will be spearheaded by the blacks of the
lower class and their vanguard party, the Black Panther
Party. Real union activity will eliminate the corporative ties
between the regime-ruling class and labor. People at the top
will be removed and the guy with the programmed mind will
have no union boss to think for him. He will remain neutrat
or join us in our fight to liberate him. We will work this
attack at the productive level indirectly by first building our
central-city communes, which will revolutionize the all too
conservative black laborer. We will build these communes
against all resistance, the pamphlet in one hand, the gun in
the other. In blacks authoritarian traits are mainly the effects
of terrorism and a lack of intellectual stimulation. They have
been choosing the less dangerous and complicated mode of
existence, survival. All classes, all people are subject to the
authoritarian syndrome. It requires only the proper set of
eco-sociological circumstantial pressures to turn blacks
around and reawaken their revolutionary consciousness.
We’re hungry.

Our overall task is to separate the people from the hated
state. They must be made to realize that the interests of the
state and the ruling class are one and the same. They must
be taught to realize that the present political regime exists
only to balance the productive forces within the society in
favor of the ruling class. It is at the ruling class and the

governing elites, including those of labor, that we must aim £-y
our bolts. The average workingman will simply withdraw or
watch with secret satisfaction or actively join in when we
bring his union boss under attack. We blacks have lived with
terrorism for generations. It no longer affects us. It will
intensify. We must prepare a counter-terrorism. A man can
never be so repressed that he cannot. strike back in some way.

But it must begin now. The Rand Corporation does 80 per-
cent of its work for the military-industrial-intelligence com-
plex; 750 or more colleges offer police science courses; 247
additional colleges offer associate degrees in law enforce-
ment; 44 offer bachelor degrees. The National Guard num-
bers 390,000. The C.I.A.D. (Counter Intelligence Analysis
Detachment) — the 1 13th military intelligence group — is de-
signed for the surveillance of private citizens. The police state
isn’t coming — it’s here, glaring and threatening.

How do we raise a new revolutionary consciousness
against a system programmed against our old methods?
Revolution is against the law. It will not be allowed, not in
significant form. That makes the true revolutionary an out-
law, and the black revolutionary a “doomed man.” As
blacks, we must function as the vanguard in any hostilities.

We must use a new approach, unite and revolutionize the
black central-city commune, and slowly provide the people
with the incentive to fight by allowing them to create pro-
grams that will meet all of their social, political and eco-
nomic needs. We must fill the vacuums left by the established
order. Wc must push the settlers off our land when they
won’t cooperate with the new communal life of our system.

We must learn from the people, we must learn from the
workers, the discipline they arc so highly skilled in. In re-
turn, we must teach them the benefits of our revolutionary
ideals. We must move blacks to the forefront of a really
productive assault on the outside enemy reactionary culture,
not only on the production level, but in all significant areas
of property relations. We must promote and support en-
forced rent strikes. Merchants must come over to our side,
or face the appropriation of their property for the commune.

We must build a subsistence economy and a socio-political
infrastructure so that we can become an example for all
revolutionary people.

Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and
efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the
leaders allow us the luxury of faint protest. Take protest too
far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will
be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buck-
shot will become the medium of exchange.

I am an extremist, a communist (not communistic, a
communist), and I must be destroyed or I will join my com-
rades in the only communist party in this country, the Black
Panther Party. I will give them my all, every dirty fighting
trick in the annals of war. Nothing will defeat our revenge
and nothing will countervail our march to victory. We come
to our conclusion: the only historical recourse that is left to
us. Freedom means warmth and protection against harsh
exposure to the elements. It means food, not garbage. It
means truth, harmony, and the social relations that spring
from these. It means the best medical attention whenever it’s
needed. It means employment that is reasonable, that coin-
cides with the individual necessities and feelings. We will
have this freedom even at the cost of total war.

The

Oppressive

Contract

First women and children in a ditch in Vietnam*
ultimately executions in the civic centers of every
look-alike county in this country

Dear John Gerassi:

As you know, I*m in a unique political position. I have
a very nearly closed future, and since I have always been
inclined to get disturbed over organized injustice or terrorist
practice against the innocents — wherever — I can now say
just about what I want (I’ve always done just about that),
without fear of seif-exposure. I can only be executed once.
No matter what l do, they will always explain me away with
the fact of my eleven years in prison and my supposed loss
of contact with objective reality. So I rage on aggressive and
free (the action on April 6). When I am denied or corrected
— I always understand — but rage on. All on the principle
that the ideal must be demonstrated that the oppressed men-
tality must be taught by example to escape the myth, the
hoax that repression can work against the collective con-
sciousness of the commune, and to prove that ideals cannot
be killed with violence. So — I’m duty bound to take the
occasion of your letter to respond with what an Irishman
once termed "the sweet taste of sedition."

I’ll go straight back to our visit and the hour they al-
lowed us to deal with alt the years. I took your casual remark
concerning "the outlaw” back to the cell with me, tooled
with it a bit, and clarified it in my own hand. I have a
hundred related questions (I am alive and learning!). Out-
laws, of course, I thought. Revolution will not be tolerated,
it is against the law in the totalitarian corporative state. The
revolutionary must certainly reconcile himself with one day
becoming an outlaw.

Then my thoughts turned to the oppressive contract in
general. It’s the nature of cancer to expand. You’ve seen a
great deal of it firsthand — U.S. expansionism since World
War II — I’ve only studied it vicariously. But we see the same
conclusions: millions of outlaws in the Union of South
Africa, Jordan, Indochina and here. Summary executions
not of uniformed soldiers but ordinary people. First women
and children in a ditch in Vietnam, ultimately executions in
the civic centers of every look-alike county in this country.

And that’s the principal contradiction of monopoly .
capital’s oppressive contract. The system produces outlaws.
It also breeds contempt for the oppressed. Accrual of con-
tempt is its fundamental survival technique. This leads to the
excesses and destroys any hope of peace eventually being
worked but between the two antagonistic classes, the haves
and the have-nots. Coexistence is impossible, contempt
breeds resistance, and resistance breeds brutality, the whole
growing in spirals that must either end in the uneconomic
destruction of the oppressed or the termination of oppres-
sion.

History is clearly a long continuum of synthesizing ele-
ments. The imbalances of the oppressive contract, ideals so
fundamentally contradictory, and forces so mutually exclu-
sive can only result in the dissolution of the agents of that
contradiction.

The corollary of the contract is quite simply malig-
nancy. It strikes first of all in the region of the brain. A search
for a nondiseased mind throws one hard against one of the
greatest historical/bioiogical calamities imaginable. Bxcuses
can be made for some workers — blind defense for the system
that is victimizing them, brainwashed by the National Ad-
vertising Council’s portrait of the silent majority as well-off
in comparison to the barbarian world. Their mindless behav-
ior can also be explained by their ignorance of labor history.
Dut even the nationalistic conditioning received in massive
doses from birth cannot completely explain why man would
turn against himself. Even the workers’ short-term economic
advantage is only a partial explanation. We must look for the
root causes in the psycho-social effect of competitiveness and
racism. The huge mass of blue-collar workers seem to be
working totally against themselves in their support of a sys-
tem owned and controlled by a tiny minority. Actually, their
contradictory behavior is explained by feelings of loyalty to
race, by their identification with the white hierarchy and by
their economic advantage over the oppressed races. They
may be oppressed themselves, but in return they are allowed
to oppress millions of others.

The economic nature of racism is not simply an aside,
Built-in physical features exclude blacks from participation,
exclude them forever. These features cannot be changed. It
is the relationship that must change. Racism is a fundamen-
tal characteristic of monopoly capital. When the white self-
congratulatory racist complains that the blacks are uncouth,
unlettered; that our areas are run-down, not maintained; that
we dress with loud tastelessness (a thing they now also say
about their own children), he forgets that he governs. He
forgets that he built the schools that are inadequate, that he
has abused his responsibility to use taxes paid by blacks to
improve their living conditions, that he manufactured the
loud pants and pointed shoes that destroy and deform the
feet. If we are not enough like him to suit his tastes, it’s
because he planned it that way. We were never intended to
be part of his world. It’s a silly contradiction for him or us
to dwell on the subject of comparisons between the enemy
culture and its creation, the subculture. The only way the
exploiter can maintain his position is to create differences
and maintain deformities.

It is the sense of the finality of their exclusion from solid
social-economic participation that forces our youth away
from the crippled family unit into the streets. It causes the
excessive importance of meaningless relationships and the
prevalence of anticominunal behavior which is a psycho-
social response to the loss of — and longing for — community.

The diseased mind . . . it’s slowly spreading throughout
the oppressed organism. Even the "magnificent savage," the
mindless overman is dying from the almost total anemia.
Where is the Black Man? I see him inseparable from the
Black Female, but where is he now? How he has survived at
all is almost beyond any rational explanation.

Early I understood the alternatives of the black situa-
tion: assimilation, meaning acceptance of the oppressive con-
tract; ossification or life below, beyond, outside of society or
revolution. But John, I admit to some confusion over the
issue of white racism growing out of my experience in prison.

My mind has vacillated between the historical references:
African feudalism and African communalism — I know that
we Africans were the first communists (J. Edgar Hoover calls
it “primitive communism” in one of the glossaries of his
anti-people books). Dr. Du Bois dealt with it in The Philadel-
phia Negro I think (I can’t quite remember now) in a positive
manner, so I never had any of the really serious hang-ups in
accepting revolution. But — I think for a while 1 sincerely felt
that Europeans were not capable of communistic Unitarian
behavior. I felt this, however, only briefly, since Unitarian,
progressive conduct seems to be a problem for all of us after
hundreds of years of steadily centralizing capitalism and, in
some areas, after thousands of years of hierarchy. I’ve always
understood that the new cultural-nationalist attempts to re-
turn to the pre-slavery past of African feudalism can only
leave the average black man more uncertain and insecure
than ever. It is difficult to understand why such negative,
academic and obscure exoticism exists when there are defi-
nite examples of historical contributions which could be used
to analyze and give meaning to our present and our future.

The commitment to total revolution must involve an
analysis of both the economic motives and the psycho-social
motives which perpetuate the oppressive contract. For the
black partisan, national structures are quite simply nonexist-
ent. A people without a collective consciousness that tran-
scends national boundaries — freaks, Afro-Amerikkkans,
Negroes, even Amerikkkans, without the sense of a larger
community than their own group — can have no effect on
history. Ultimately they will simply be eliminated from the
scene. Without the collective sense of community, without its
movement (Bobby Hutton, the shoot-out on Central, August
7*) and institutions (our survival projectst that will now
grow into infrastructure), we simply never will be an effective
force.

During the nationalist period of the collective oppressed
mentality promoted by the establishment, the movement is
frozen, static. This is the level of development favored by the
oppressor, the artless empty ideals of the pseudo-nation, love
and respect for a flag, a nationalistic song or beat, the fervent

belief in a bond or organization which arises out of a
thwarted longing for real community. The establishment ** ”
does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary
rage is redirected into empty outlets which provide pressure
releases for desires that could become dangerous if allowed
to progress. At this stage in the development of monopoly
capitalism, there are two alternatives: aggressive revolution-
ary activity or calcification. Conservative society, black or
white, is decadent society; due to the absence of creativity
and movement, conservative society always burns itself out.

Your letter got right at the heart of that principle. The
whole ideal of cultural nationalism has been all but smoth-
ered now. It was basically contrived out of the loss of com-
munity and the terms of the oppressive contract — coercive |
conformity and indulgent flexibility to the demands of hier-
archy. But we must all realize that the oppressive contract
cannot be broken as long as any sort of hierarchy exists to
perpetuate the sensitized relationships of Amerikan tribal-
ism, classism and racism. Society is rendered impossible by
such relationships. The establishment of society through in-
tercommunalism 4 ' will require that the social contract be
completely altered. Clearly alteration cannot take place un- .
less hierarchy is destroyed. Can we expect the hierarchy to
do away with itself???

Then the real undertaking at present is the uncondi-
tional freeing of the people. We plunge beyond ideological
debate before this immediate task. The black man and the
black female must be, as I have mentally ordered things,
completely joined together in the act of liberation! I accept

•Three instances of armed black resistance: Lit* Bobby Hutton was
killed in the aftermath of a prolonged shoot-out with the Oakland police
that involved Gldridge Cleaver. Hutton was shot and killed shortly after
emerging from the basement of a house to surrender, naked, as the police
had demanded, and with both his hands in the air. Police claim they shot
him when he attempted to escape.

The shoot-out on Central is described in a previous note; the signifi-
cance of August 7th is described in the introduction. — Ed.

fTlie new programs of the Black Panther Parly which include free
medical clinics, breakfast programs, cooperative factories, housing, libera-
tion schools and prison projects. — Ed.

my black mama with all her fears for my life that border on y /
hysteria at times. But I also realize that it is the “role of the
living, ” of all the innocent, to discover unitary practice and
conduct and move against the institutions that close on the
oppressed.

Those who have more regard for their own egos or
self-interest than they have for building a united progressive
left, and those who abandon community altogether in favor
of petty interests, are in direct opposition to our real inter-

*Huey Newton’s concept of the revolutionary solidarity of all the op-
pressed peoples of the world. — Ed.

ests. They are attempting another form of escapism. They’re
fleeing the objective conditions of their real life and will
eventually reach the ultimate contradiction of facing their
father or brother, or old classmate, comrade, or wife, over
the barrel of a gun. Or they will find themselves in no man’s
land, cast out by the people, suspected by their crime part-
ners.* But, regarding the crisis Oust past) in the party, t as
Huey Newton reminds us, there is always a positive side to
each negative. The confused resentment and reverse racism
of the black partisan will eventually lead to a new, more
productive and creative contribution. Already we realize that
there was no split in the party, only a defection. The party
has come out of it stronger. We can now bring our strategy
and tactics into a realistic conformity with our total objective
situation. Recall we discussed Jonathan and guerrilla
strategy in the urban situation at length over that piece of
paper with circles and lines, arrows and question marks.

I guess now that he is dead, and the guilty are safe from
the muscle of his mind and arm, it is safe to reveal some of
his thoughts and functions within the matrix of the party and
movement. He felt as I did that the military and political
branches, though married in purpose and direction, in these

*ln prison argot, a man's most trusted companion. — Ed.
fThe departure from the Black Panther Party of Eldridge Cleaver
and some of his followers in Algeria and New York. — Ed.

opening stages should function separately from each other g
for very obvious reasons. In undeveloped countries, the es-
tablishment's military-strike forces are not more than thirty
miles down a dirt road in the provincial capital. They’re
always within a few moments of strike. The urban guerrilla,
however, can mingle with the enemy and remain invisible
and invulnerable. In our present situation there is no contra-
diction between the military thinking and action and the
primacy of politics. The situation allows for such activity as
the August 7th movement, because it can be accomplished
without giving the enemy-state forces the pretext they need
to move in and destroy the political apparatus — under the
very convenient and much used Anglo-Saxon conspiracy
laws. The primacy of politics will continue as long as the
military reads, picks up and works well within the prevailing
political matrix. So Jonathan’s raid on the military and
judiciary that Friday was at once an expression of his own
aggressive consciousness and that of the party. It is easy to
infer all of this in retrospect that Jonathan was head of a
clandestine army which saw the Black Panther Party as its
political leader. Operating on his own, he was able to at least
attempt to support some of the minimum demands of the
people without placing Huey Newton and David Hilliard in
jeopardy of loss of movement or death, i.e., persecution in
courts.

That this is our only recourse at the present level of
development is too obvious to even dwell on. It will not be
possible, however, in the advanced stages of revolution. Just
a glance at the present level of consciousness and the status
of the survival infrastructure will reveal the error of Clea-
ver’s analysis that no separation should exist even now be-
tween military and political cadre, between military and
political action. You know I sent him a message suggesting
that Unitarian conduct depends on a principled discipline
and submission to democratic centralism instead of the ego-
ism that sent him first against his Muslims (through the
Sacramento Bee Pig press that time), then against the Peace
and Freedom Party, even against the progressive elements of

the C.P. through his unreasoned attack on the magnificent
Angela Davis. Recently he has even attacked the dedicated,
overworked and brilliant Charles Garry. It seems to be a
pattern with the man. You recall the attack he launched
against Fidel and Cuba, and those accounts that seemed
disparaging of his hosts which have reached the pig press
here from time to time.

My personal message to him was mild, considering that
he was in fact leaving his old comrades open to attack again.

I sent a letter reminding him that his behavior while in prison
was far from exemplary and had that section of it signed by
Ulysses McDaniel and Clifford Jefferson, two of the oldest
(time in) and most respected black partisans in the California
concentration camp system. I then listed some of his behav-
ioral patterns since his release — a more complete list than the
one just given — that did not indicate that he had changed
much. I finally asked him simply to show proof now that he
was not a compulsive disrupter or agent provocateur. A very
mild request, I feel. He returned with a very scurrilous and
profane set of invectives — in short, a piece of vendetta. Tell
him that seven thousand miles, the walls of prison, steel and
barbed wire do not make him safe from my special brand of
discipline, tell him that the dragon is coming . . .

The substructured prison movements are gaining
momentum. My trial is set for early August, 1971, there’ll
be hearings in between of course. If they are at all like the
last,* you’ll get to see my special bastardized style of martial
arts. I’m working hard to stay in form. I wasn’t at my best
at the last showing. I’ll clean them all next time they attack.
Attend — let me see your style.

Your comrade in arms — “He who does not fear the
death of 1,000 cuts will dare unseat the emperor.”

George Jackson

♦The hearing of April 6, 1971.

Afterword

Statement by Huey P. Newton, Servant of
the People, Black Panther Party at the
Revolutionary Memorial Service for
George Jackson

Power to the People, Power to our fallen comrade Brother George
Jackson, member of the Black Panther Party. First, because many
people are wondering, I would like to explain the connection be-
tween Brother George Jackson and the Black Panther Party.

When I went to prison in 1967 I met George. Not physically,
but through his ideas, his thoughts and words. He was at Soledad
Prison at the time; I was at California Penal Colony. George was
a legendary figure throughout the prison system, where he spent
most of life, I met George through his spirit. Shortly after
learning * >ut him I got word through the prison grapevine that
he wanted to join the Black Panther Party. At his request he was
made a member of the People's Revolutionary Army with the rank
of general and field marshal. He was put in charge of the prison
recruiting, and was asked to go on with his life as a revolutionary
example, which was the most important thing that one can ever do,
because that cannot be killed.

I say that the legendary figure is also a hero. George Jackson
was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners,
for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary
fervor that's characteristic of any soldier for the people, He in-
spired prisoners, whom I later encountered, io put his ideas into
practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that
although George's body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his
ideas live. And we will see that these ideas stay alive, because
they'll be manifested in our bodies and in these young Panthers’
bodies, who are our children. So it’s a true saying that there will
be revolution from one generation to the next. This was George's
legacy, and he will go on, he will go on into immortality, because
we believe that the people will win, we know the people will win,
as they advance, generation upon generation.

What kind of standard did George Jackson set? First, he was
a strong man, without fear, determined, full of love, strength, and
dedication to the people's cause. He lived a life that we must praise.
No matter how he was oppressed, no matter how wrongly he was

done, he still kept the love for the people. And this is why he felt
no pain in giving up his life for the people’s cause.

The state itself sets the stage for the kind of contradiction or
violence that occurs in our world, particularly in the prisons. The
ruling circle of the United States has terrorized the world. The state
has the audacity to say they have the right to kill. They say they
have a death penalty and it's legal. But I say by the laws of nature
that no death penalty can he legal — it’s only cold-blooded murder.
It spurs all sorts of violence, because every man has a contract with
himself, to keep himself alive at all costs. Legally the state can only
confine someone, subject to correction at a later date. Even if the
state does wrong it could give itself the semblance of legality by
leaving open the possibility of rectification. But of course with the
death penalty, with the kind of violence that we see in our commu-
nity where the police are also the executioners, we don't have this
chance of negotiation. They have the audacity to say that people
should deliver a life to them without a struggle. None of us can
accept that. Oeorge Jackson had every right to do everything
possible to preserve his life and the life of his comrades, the life of
the People.

Even after his death, George Jackson is a legendary figure and
a hero. Even the oppressor realizes this. To cover their murder they
say that George Jackson kitted five people, five oppressors, and
wounded three in the space of thirty seconds. You know, some-
times I like to overlook the fact that this would be physically
impossible. Blit after all George Jackson is my hero. And I would
like to think that it was possible; I would be very happy thinking
that George Jackson had the strength because that would have
made him superman. (Of course, my hero would have to be a
superman.) And we will raise our children to be like George Jack-
son, to live like George Jackson and to fight for freedom as George
Jackson fought for freedom.

George’s last statement, the example of his conduct at San
Quentin on that terrible day* left a standard for political prisoners
and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America. He left
a standard for the liberation armies of the world. He showed us
how to act. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized
by the weapon. And this will certainly be true, because the people
will take care of that, George also said once that the oppressor is
very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down
to our very knees, he might crush us to the ground, but it will be
physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his
legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson
and the people will tear his kneecaps off.

But first the state sets the scene for such violence, you see. And
some people say that we can’t get rid of this kind of physical
conflict with more of the same, Well, I would take issue with this
(we can use that example of the oppressor stomping George Jack-
son down to his knees; he can’t go on), We will retaliate with
violence against his violence. It’s true that well be hurt by his
violence but we’re determined not to let him wipe out the people.
We know that he cannot wipe out the people, because we will fight
on. We will tear his legs off, we’ll tear his head off and we’ll take
the example from George Jackson. In the name of love and in the
name of freedom, with love as our guide, we'll slit every throat of
anyone who threatens the people and our children. Well do it in
the name of peace, if this is what we are forced to do; because as
soon as it’s over, then we can have the kind of world where violence
will no longer exist.

So we will be very practical. We won’t make statements and
believe the things the prison officials say — their incredible stories
about one man killing five people in thirty seconds. We will go on
and live very realistically. There will be pain and much suffering
in order for us to develop. But even in our suffering, I see a strength
growing. I see the example that George set living on. We know that
all of us will die someday. But we know that there are two kinds
of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One
death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in
a significant way, and his death will be very heavy, while the deaths
of the ones that fell that day in San Quentin will be lighter than
a feather. Even those who support them now will not support them
in the future, because we’re determined to change their minds.
We’ll change their minds or else in the people’s name we’ll have
to wipe them out thoroughly, wholly, absolutely and completely.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE,

BLOOD IN MY EYE

Published 1990, by;

BLACK CLASSIC PRESS
through arrangements with Random House
Cover art concept and design by Emory Douglas
Copyright (c) 1972 by Stronghold Consolidated Productions, Inc.

Preface copyright (c) 1072 BY Gregory Armstrong

All rtghle reserved

Originally published by Random House Inc.
L C Card Catalog Number:

ISBN: 0-933121-23-7

IN MEMORY OF

COMRADE GEORGE

by SEKOU KAMBUI

v. ‘

B/ond In /My iiyc captures the spirit of
George Jackson’s legendary
resistance to unbridled oppression
and racism. His unique and incisively
critical perspective becomes the
unifying thread that ties together this
collection of letters and essays in
which he presents his analysis of
armed struggle, class war, fascism,
communism, and a wide array of
other topics.

B ton ft hi My I: ye was completed
only days before its author was killed.

George Jackson died on August 21,

1971 at the hands of San Quentin
prison guards during an alleged
escape attempt. At age eighteen
George Jackson was convicted of stealing seventy dollars from a gas station
and was sentenced to one year to life. He was to spend the rest of his
life — eleven years — in the California prison system, seven of them in solitary
confinement. In prison he read widely and transformed himself into an
activist and political theoretician who defined himself as a revolutionary. As
a revolutionary he found meaning in his daily prison existence. Ajid it was in
that context that he came to terms with the death of his younger brother
Jonathan — killed while attempting to free three Black prisoners from
custody at a California courthouse.

Jackson’s first book, So/cdod Brother: The Pnson Writings of George Jockson,
published in 1970, earned him the respect and admiration of progressive
people around the world. But even before (bat book, Jackson was a legendary
figure inside the California prison system, known to all as an
uncompromising individual. A fellow prisoner described him as “a very
beautiful example of what a Black man should be.”

In a letter to Ajigela Davis, Jackson wrote, “If my enemies, your
enemies, prove stronger [than us,] at least I want them to know that they
made one righteous African man extremely angry.” On another occasion he
wrote, “They’ll never count me among the broken men.” As Blood In My I iyc
affirms, George Jackson remained unbroken.

ISBN 0-933121-23-7 $14.95

90000

9 ^780933 1

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